The Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities in South African Schools 9781623968885

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The Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities in South African Schools

A volume in Education Policy in Practice: Critical Cultural Studies Edmund Hamann and Rodney Hopson, Series Editors

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The Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities in South African Schools Saloshna Vandeyar University of Pretoria

Thirusellvan Vandeyar University of Pretoria

INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC. Charlotte, NC • www.infoagepub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data   A CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress   http://www.loc.gov ISBN: 978-1-62396-886-1 (Paperback) 978-1-62396-887-8 (Hardcover) 978-1-62396-888-5 (ebook)

Copyright © 2015 Information Age Publishing Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Series Foreword............................................................................. vii Edmund Hamann and Rodney Hopson Acknowledgement........................................................................... xi 1 The Construction of Immigrant Student Identities in South African Schools................................................................................ 1 Introduction....................................................................................... 1 Race Remains the Primary Point of Reference............................... 4 Migration and Xenophobia in South Africa....................................... 8 Xenophobic Mayhem of 2008............................................................. 9 Race and Identity............................................................................. 11 Transnationalism and Identity........................................................ 12 Our Participants.............................................................................. 13 Paradigms, Design, and Methodology........................................... 14 The Research Process and Phases of Inquiry..................................... 15 Enhancing the Quality of the Study............................................... 17 Scope and Limitations..................................................................... 19 Ethical Considerations..................................................................... 20 Outline of Remaining Chapters..................................................... 20 Notes................................................................................................. 21



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2 The Architecture of Identity.......................................................... 23 Introduction..................................................................................... 23 Theorizing Identity.......................................................................... 25 Negotiating the Currents of a Complex Society............................ 27 The Social Climate and Ethos of Reception....................................... 29 The Social Mirror............................................................................ 29 Psychosocial Passing........................................................................ 31 Immigrant Stress.............................................................................. 31 Identity Manifestations.................................................................... 32 Identity Pathways: Styles of Adaptation............................................ 34 Limitations in the Identity Literature............................................ 37 Conceptual Markers........................................................................ 38 Theoretical Moorings...................................................................... 40 Critical Race Theory........................................................................ 40 Figures of Identification................................................................... 42 Identity Theories and Immigrant Blackness................................. 43 3 So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?............. 45 Introduction..................................................................................... 45 The Constitution, Representation, and Negotiation of Identities................................................................................ 46 The Projection of Self into Social Roles and Expression of Membership into Groups..................................................... 47 Identity as Narrative...................................................................47 Identity as Social Orientation.......................................................... 60 Identity as Agency............................................................................ 64 Negotiating Affiliations................................................................... 75 Identity as Social Representation...................................................75 Identity as Categorization................................................................ 78 Conclusion........................................................................................ 85 Notes................................................................................................. 86 4 New Insights...................................................................................87 Introduction..................................................................................... 87 Echoing the Literature.................................................................... 88 The Social Mirror.......................................................................88 Double Consciousness...................................................................... 88

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Dominating Ethnic Identities........................................................... 89 Hyphenated Identities...................................................................... 89 Language and Accent...................................................................... 90 Identity as Categorization................................................................ 91 Homogeneous Categorization of Blacks............................................. 92 Differences....................................................................................... 93 The Social Mirror.......................................................................93 Psychosocial Passing........................................................................ 93 Identity Pathways............................................................................ 94 Rural/Urban Binary....................................................................... 96 New Insights..................................................................................... 96 Continental Identity................................................................... 96 Self-Agency and an Inherent Drive to Improve the Human Condition of Others.................................................................. 97 Language as a Tool of Power........................................................... 98 Relating Findings to the Conceptual Markers of the Study......... 99 Dialogue Between Findings and Theoretical Groundings of this Study............................................................................... 99 Figures of Identification...............................................................99 Critical Race Theory...................................................................... 100 Conclusion...................................................................................... 103 5 Implications for Education Policy, for Research and Practice......105 Immigrant Learners...................................................................... 105 Summary of Key Findings............................................................. 106 Identity as Narrative...................................................................... 106 Identity as Social Orientation........................................................ 107 Identity as Agency.......................................................................... 107 Identity as Social Representation.................................................... 107 Identity as Categorization.............................................................. 108 Significance of Findings—Generation of New Knowledge........ 108 Research Assumptions Revisited.................................................. 109 Suggestions for Further Research.................................................111 Recommendations for Policy and Practice...................................114 Recommendation 1.........................................................................114 Recommendation 2.........................................................................114 Recommendation 3........................................................................ 115

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Recommendation 4........................................................................ 115 Recommendation 5........................................................................ 115 Recommendation 6.........................................................................116 Final Thoughts................................................................................116 References............................................................................................. 119

Series Foreword Edmund Hamann and Rodney Hopson

W

hen we were born (“we” being the two book series editors), our country, the United States, was in the midst of the painful throes of the (still unfinished) Civil Rights movement. This movement, and others that would follow—around gender and women’s rights, for the disabled, and for others from other underserved communities in the United States— would serve as harbinger for change globally and locally. This same wind of change would be evident in other nation states. When they were born, the two coauthors of this volume were children both living in different Indian townships in apartheid South Africa. Both had been forced as infants to move, from Pretoria and Johannesburg respectively, into townships where they were assigned to live because of their racial identities. Both authors then came of age still under the aegis of apartheid and prepared as teachers—teachers for Indian students in Indian townships—as that was one of the few available professions to those in their racial category. Much then has changed during the lifespans of the four of us, and this book is a product of the political advances and serendipity of the historic moment that we have been blessed to share. Yet as much as our lives might demonstrate reasons for optimism as one thinks about changes in South Africa, Africa, and the United States in relation to the transcendence of racial differentiation and hierarchy, this book is a reminder of how both harConstruction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities, pages ix–xi Copyright © 2015 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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rowing and incomplete that journey is. This book, a crucial addition from the Global South to the scholarship on immigrant students’ schooling, depicts how salient and fraught racial identity, both asserted and ascribed, continues to be for the negotiation of school in South Africa. Immigrant students are loathed and marginalized for their accents and “foreign” ways, and yet they are also stereotyped and viewed jealously as more serious and committed students than their native-born Black peers. This tension directs energy laterally, with Black native-born and Black newcomer struggling for comparatively small reward in a still largely stratified system, a system in which the stronger and better-resourced schools during apartheid remain the stronger and better resourced schools now under democratic rule. The tension related to identity and who deserves what deflects critique from the persistence of a system that still largely rations schooling as a vehicle for social mobility and opportunities for all. The supposedly dramatic changes in schooling that have occurred with the advent of democracy (changes that, to be sure, have meant previously all-White schools are no longer all White) still allow the native-born Black child to too often be understood as feckless and fail to critique why such a student might be skeptical of what school ultimately offers to her or him. In turn, despite the pan-African “Africa for Africans” rhetoric that helped give the African National Congress (ANC) moral legitimacy and safe harbor in postcolonial Africa, neither policy nor practice toward immigrant students imagines them as welcome members of an advancing continental vanguard. This book by Vandeyar and Vandeyar provides a number of important discoveries. They broaden the literature on immigrants and schooling by offering a vivid example from South Africa. They make visible a large student population that many readers may not have previously considered. They elegantly weave together insights from psychology and anthropology about identity construction and situated assertions of group memberships. But, most powerfully, they are angry that the inclusive ideals of South Africa’s turn to democracy—ideals that should celebrate both difference and entrepreneurial pluck—continue to be unrealized or underrealized. They describe a world better than the one they were born into, but not as much better as it should be. The actual practices of South African schools too often fall short of the policy goals promised in South Africa’s 1996 Constitution. Both these authors and the students whose voices they capture need us to be troubled by that. Crain Soudien, a leading South African education researcher at the University of Cape Town, recently wrote:

Series Foreword    xi [T]hat very little work has been done in South Africa which recognizes the centrality of education as a space of constant contradiction, and the especially the contradiction of ideas of self, other, and community. The result is that it has been particularly difficult for those who work in and inhabit the school and the world of education to approach the questions of identity with clarity. . . . [I]t remains difficult for teachers to actually understand who the people are in front of them. (2012, p. 19, italics in original)

Vandeyar and Vandeyar help us better see why and how these contradictions are generated and regenerated amidst the hope for education and democracy for all. As importantly, they are insistent about who it is—students, immigrant, and native-born—that South African educators and we readers need to better understand.

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Acknowledgement

We wish to thank the South African Netherlands Programme on Alternatives in Development (SANPAD) for funding the broader project on Immigrant Student Identities in South African schools. Without the financial and various other forms of support of SANPAD, the broader project and this book publication would not have come to fruition. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to Professor Edmund T. Hamann for his continued support of this scholarly endeavour, for his valuable insights and meticulous attention to detail as a critical peer reviewer and copy-editor of this volume. Your varied contributions in this regard has enriched us and this work immeasurably. Thank you so much Ted. Unselfish and noble actions are the most radiant pages in the biography of souls. —David Thomas

Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities, page xiii Copyright © 2015 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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1 The Construction of Immigrant Student Identities in South African Schools

Think, instead of identity as a “production,” which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside representation. —Hall, 1993, p. 395

Introduction South Africa is famous in the world imaginary as the Rainbow Nation, host of the 2010 World Cup, land of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, and more infamously for apartheid. It is much less well known as a receiving country for immigrants, including school-age youth who enroll in South African schools. Yet making sense of the two quotes below and the myriad others shared mainly in Chapter 3 is not possible without considering how immigration is challenging South Africa’s sense of what as a country it proposes to be. Brenda and Vanessa are examples of members of families attracted to South Africa from elsewhere on the continent (in their cases, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC], respectively). Their quotes highlight that in a country with 11 constitutionally recognized Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities, pages 1–22 Copyright © 2015 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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languages, language can be a vehicle of exclusion as well as inclusion. Their comments highlight how place and welcome are negotiated through quotidian interaction at the classroom level and how teachers as well as peers can be sources of challenge as well as favorable reception. Some teachers know that we don’t understand the language, but when they are teaching, even an important point, they say it in another language that we cannot understand, and like there are some students if they don’t like you they will say it another language and you can hear this person is commenting but you don’t understand. (Brenda, Nigeria) I kind of forced them to learn to know who I am because a lot of people expect you because you’re black to know Zulu or Xhosa and then I make it a point to people that I’m not this, I’m prepared to learn your language, but I’m not . . . that’s not who I am; I let people know. (Vanessa, DRC)

Describing the cases of Brenda and Vanessa (as well as dozens of other immigrant students from elsewhere in Africa and South Asia) is a conscious attempt to make the invisible visible. As education researchers, teacher educators, and former K–12 classroom teachers, as well as native-born South Africans, we believe that South Africa is prospectively invigorated by its attractiveness to newcomers. However, it is concurrently challenged by their presence in schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces. Determining best policies for schooling newcomers and natives alike can only be wiser and more responsive if they are empirically informed. Voices like Brenda’s and Vanessa’s matter. They shine a welcome, if sometimes uncomfortable, light on the identities promoted formally and informally in South African schools, as well as on the affiliations and possibilities aspired to by students negotiating the education system that was once a formal tool of stratification and segmentation before its more recent change of charge to build a new, more just and inclusive nation state. The advent of democracy (the term commonly used to refer to the end of apartheid) has created new and as yet only partially understood opportunities for migration in and to South Africa. As a result, South Africa is now, more than ever, witnessing an increasing volume and diversity of immigrants crossing its borders. The (re)insertion of South Africa into the global economy and related economic growth has made it the chosen host country for many legal and undocumented migrants from other Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries (Bouillon, 1998; Klotz, 2000; Peberdy & Crush, 1998; Ramphele, 1999; Rogerson, 1997; Saasa, 1996), as well as from countries as far afield as Sri Lanka, Mauritius, India, Pakistan, and Singapore. Legal migration from SADC countries has increased almost tenfold since 1990 to over four million immigrants per

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year (Crush & MacDonald, 2000; Crush, William, Eleanor, & Lurie, 2005). Consequently, traditional forms of migration are being reconfigured and new forms of migrant linkage are emerging between traditional neighbors (Crush, Jeeves, & Yudelman, 1991). These reconfigured and new forms of migrant linkages hold serious implications for immigrant children in South African schools as the dynamics of belonging or exclusion are nowhere as harsh as in the day-to-day activities on the classroom floor and in the schoolyard (Coe, Reynolds, Boehm, Hess, & Rae-Espinoza, 2011). Immigrant students’ journeys into their new homes and subsequently into new schools are characterized by multiple pathways that are precipitated and/or impacted by a variety of factors: political, religious, and ethnic persecution; economic incentives; and a search for better opportunities and life chances. However, in this search for better life chances in South Africa, immigrant students are often stripped of many of their sustaining social relationships, as well as the social roles that provide them with culturally scripted notions of how they fit into the world, resulting in acculturative stress, as has also been documented elsewhere (Berry, 1997; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001). Forging ‘identities of inclusion’ may be the single greatest challenge for these immigrant youth. In this regard, Suárez-Orozco poses some pertinent questions that have a direct bearing on this study: Do they feel comfortable in their homeland? Do they feel accepted by the “native-born” of the host country? What relationship do they have with their parents’ country of origin? Is their sense of identity rooted “here,” “there,” “everywhere” or “nowhere”? How do they forge collective identities that honor both their parents’ culture of origin as well as their new home in South Africa? How can they develop a sense of belonging while coping with the dissonance of “excluded citizenship”? (2004, p. 176)

Since the advent of democracy, most public schools in South Africa, in addition to opening their doors to all South African children, irrespective of race, color, or creed, have also opened their doors to a number of (Black) immigrant children.1 There is, however, very little research on the ways in which immigrant students’ identities are framed, challenged, asserted, and negotiated within the dominant institutional cultures of schools. This dearth is even more acute if we add the further parameters of research from the Global South or from a host country whose population is not majority European or European descent. Accordingly, this study considers how immigrant students constructed, negotiated, and represented their identities within the South African schooling context at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century.

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The following research questions guided this study: (a) To what extent has the post-apartheid ethos of these schools been transformed towards integration in the truest sense, and how do immigrant students perceive this in practice? In this study, true integration means that the country of birth or newness of arrival does not predict any relationship about the extent to which a student is welcomed or supported. (b) Are new forms of immigrant students’ self-identities beginning to emerge? Finally, (c) what is the interplay between the extant formal and informal policies as practiced of these schools (which shape their ethos) and the agentive efforts of the newcomers to position who they are and could be?

Race Remains the Primary Point of Reference In South Africa, “race remains the primary point of reference” (Soudien, 1994, p. 56; see also Soudien, Carrim, & Sayed, 2004; Soudien, 2012). Under apartheid, race interpretations not only were often grounded in the discredited theory of fundamental nature, but also played a key role in human rights abuses. In an attempt to protect and rationalize the economic and administrative privilege and power of the minority White population, four essentialized racial classifications were legislated: White, African, Colored, and Indian (Moodley & Adam, 2004).2 The latter three have been further homogenized through the common representation of Blackness, and consequently, in post-apartheid discourse, the Black experience (Carter, 2012; Potgieter, 2002). In order to ensure continued supremacy, Whiteness was fabricated and presented as morally, intellectually, and biologically superior; Blackness was subaltern. In accordance with the prevailing mentality, identities were presented as rigid, fixed, and hierarchical. Education both reflected and helped construct this segregated and inequitable environment, with every aspect of schooling regulated according to race (Carrim, 1998; Sayed, 2001). The need for rectification and parity in all aspects of education was thus a necessary imperative in a new, democratic education system (Sayed, 2001). Since 1994, various policies have been developed, and legislation has been enacted to encourage the process of desegregation (read: integration) in the schooling system of South Africa. The South African Schools Act (Act no. 37 of 1996) catalyzed by South Africa’s Bill of Rights and the South African Constitution, formalized the desegregation of schools in South Africa, and created the opportunity for students from diverse cultural backgrounds to attend schools of their choice. It was hoped that in creating this opportunity, students would become integrated into the whole school environment and the seeds of a new society would be sown.

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Although the above policies set the stage for desegregation to unfold at schools by establishing the physical proximity of members of different groups in the same school, it did not go further to interrogate the quality of contact, not only in the personal attitudes of students and teachers but also in the institutional arrangements, policies, and ethos of the school (Sayed, 2001). As a result, schools in South Africa are “still grappling with the apartheid legacy of separate and unequal schooling” (Moletsane, Hemson, & Muthukrishna 2004, p. 61; see also Vandeyar, 2006). Instead of becoming models of societal integration (Jansen, 2004), schools have, with scant exception (e.g., Vandeyar & Jansen, 2008), continued to reflect the hegemonic dominance of Whiteness that characterized pre-apartheid schooling and, as a result, racism and social stratification at and through schools have persisted (Carter, 2012; Vally & Dalamba, 1999). Studies have indicated that popular culture has further entrenched the polarities of Whiteness and Blackness (Jansen, 2004; Vandeyar, 2006). In an attempt to regain perceived lost power and privilege in a post-apartheid South Africa, research showed that White students reformulated their personal and collective identities through an illusory link to Europe. Eurocentric popular culture was seen to be emblematic of White privilege and protection (Dolby, 2000). Black popular culture became a yardstick in interpretations of Whiteness as through the negation of Blackness, White students were able to reconstruct a “global White” identity unrelated to the nation-state (Dolby, 2000). Studies in this field, most notably those of Dolby (2000, 2001, 2002), Vally and Dalamba (1999), and Carter (2012), explore how South African youth make meaning of the idea of race. The Vally and Dalamba (1999) report uncovered overt forms of racial practices and youth identity that centered on the issue of “them” and “us.” Dolby’s studies have shown that in the new context of globalization, fashion, style, and ultimately “taste,” compete with “ancestry” and “geography” as pivotal variables in the elaboration of youth identities. Carter (2012) notes declining White enrollments, even at ex-Model C schools (further explained later), even as the White students she interviewed dismissed the premise that democratic South Africa was better than its apartheid predecessor. To date, studies in this field have focused mainly on the Black and White dynamics of South African students. There is very little, if any research on the experiences of Black immigrant students within South African schools. Furthermore, in much of the research on hybridity and transculturalization, the important role of schooling as a mediating force in identity-making processes has also received little attention. Schools, through both formal and informal relationships, represent powerful interpretations of what it means to be “South African,” “Mozambican,” or “Zimbabwean”—that is, of belong-

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ing and non-belonging. This research study sets out to explore how Black immigrant students construct, mediate, and represent their identities in South African schools. The context of this study was limited to the Gauteng province, South Africa’s most populous province, which includes Johannesburg (South Africa’s largest city) and Pretoria (the administrative capital). The central cities of Gauteng have some of South Africa’s largest numbers of Black immigrants, who are diverse not only in terms of national origin, but by ethnic affiliation, cultural tradition, languages spoken, and generational status. The majority of Black immigrants in the Gauteng are from Mozambique, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Swaziland, Botswana, Angola, and Malawi, but substantial numbers of immigrants also come from Zambia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Namibia, India, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Mauritius (Department of Education, 2007, Ten day statistics). As this population continues to grow, its children have begun to experience South African schools in an array of uniquely challenging ways. As a result of these demographic trends, research analyses of South African education should increasingly focus on how Black immigrant youth fare. While mainstream sociological theories (mainly with the United States as their lead reference point) have striven to capture the social and economic experiences of transnationally mobile children (Portes & Zhou, 1993; Waters, 1999), less is known than might be about their day-to-day experiences in academic settings because studies focusing on these types of experiences often statistically group these children with domestic populations on the basis of “race” and the data compiled are rarely segregated on the basis of any other social identity dimension (Harry & Klingner, 2006). The blanket grouping of these populations creates both theoretical and practical challenges for researchers and educators alike. It is interesting to note that South Africa shares a research challenge (i.e., the invisible distinction between immigrant “Black” and native-born “Black”) with other countries. Theoretically, the homogeneous categorization of Blacks ignores the important national, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, political, and even racial differences that exist within the population (Awokoya & Clark, 2008). In particular, these homogenous descriptions ignore the fact that, for many Black immigrant students, racial and ethnic identities are fluid and complex, and thus many do not strictly identify with the rigid and dichotomous Black/White constructs through which racial and ethnic identities have been understood in South Africa. In addition, by presenting members of the African Diaspora as a monolithic group, researchers neglect the increasing racial and intraracial strife that affects individual development and

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academic achievement, as well as school climate (Jackson & Cochran, 2003; Traore & Lukens, 2006). Practically, the lack of information concerning Black immigrant students in South Africa has had a significant impact on their educational development. Although some achieve even in the face of obstacles and limited opportunity, many Black immigrant students have been underserved in South African schools due to cultural misunderstandings and the “naturalization” of the idea that students like them should attend the less well-resourced schools of former townships. Additionally, Black immigrant students have often erroneously been perceived by school personnel as intellectually weak, unintelligent, or academically incapable because of poor English language proficiency. This linguistic dimension is an unsurprising result in many instances of students migrating from countries where English was not the colonial language (e.g., Francophone immigrant students from the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Lusophone immigrant students from Mozambique and Angola). As a result, many of these students are wrongly placed in lower grade levels or have to repeat grades upon arrival in South Africa when the transfer of previous credits is refused (Awokoya & Clark, 2008). Black immigrant students’ frequent academic difficulties have been further compounded by the challenges many experience in forming their identities in their very different home and school environments. Many Black immigrant students experience difficulty in reconciling the expectations placed upon them by their traditional culture (generally found in the home) and those that hail from South Africa or the Eurocentric culture generally found in South African school settings. Many Black immigrant students have found that their hybrid home–school cultural identities were not accepted by family members, who often have accused them of being “too Western,” or by their peers, who have questioned the “authenticity” of their “Blackness.” For these immigrant students, forging a sense of identity has perhaps become their single greatest challenge. Some of the data collected for this research study were captured during the height of a series of well-publicized, xenophobic attacks in South Africa in May 2008 (Hassim, Kupe, & Worby, 2008). At that time, Black immigrant students were framing, challenging, asserting, and negotiating their identities not only within the dominant institutional cultures of schools, but within the context of larger societal tension that was exacerbated by sensationalistic media attention. As immigrant students have negotiated elsewhere (e.g., Gitlin, Buendía, Crosland, & Doumbia, 2003), their “welcome” was at best uncertain and often much harsher than that in terms of both informal peer treatment and even institutional encounters (Becker, 1990).

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This context has been highly salient in the formation of their identities and in everyday interactions between South African and immigrant students at schools. So it is not only necessary but also pertinent to have some insight into both the history of migration and xenophobia in South Africa.

Migration and Xenophobia in South Africa The history of institutionalized, stratified labor migration from neighboring African countries under apartheid (and indeed of the effort to render residents in so-called “homelands” as foreigners, deprived of citizenship rights in white South Africa) provides a background context for more recent displays of xenophobia in South Africa (Crush, 2008; Landau, Ramkathan-Keogh, & Singh, 2005). The regulation of population flows in South Africa is not a new phenomenon (Harris, 2002). During the apartheid era, restrictions were even placed on internal movements (such as population registration, pass laws, and the Bantustans) that were much harsher than state polices regarding cross-border migration (Neocosmos, 2006, 2008). Despite the often hostile and subordinating reception, migration to South Africa was inevitable and necessary because of the pull factors of mining and agriculture (Crush, 2008; Landau et al., 2005). Prior to democracy, South Africa’s immigration policy was utilized as a tool of racial domination (Khan, 2007). Until 1991, the official definition of an immigrant was that he or she had to assimilate into the White population (Crush, 2008). This meant, per the “logic” of apartheid, that Africans who migrated into South Africa were not recognized with the status of immigrants (as they could not assimilate into the White population). Instead, they arrived in South Africa as contract migrants as part of the South African migrant labor system (Crush, 2008). Since the advent of democracy, however, there has been a notable increase in migration from the SADC region primarily due to the demise of apartheid in South Africa and the integration of South Africa into the global economy (Crush, 2008; Pendleton, 2008). Sadly, alongside this, South Africa has generated continued intolerance and animosity towards immigrants, albeit with less institutional intrusion by the state (Harris, 2002; Landau et al., 2005; Reitzes, 2009). Foreigners have been regarded as threats to the social and fiscal stability of South Africa (McDonald, 1998; McDonald, Zinyama, Gay, De Vletter, & Mattes, 2000). But not all foreign-originating newcomers are viewed equally; Peberdy argues that the African foreigner is represented as a physical disease that literally threatens the body politic with contamination: “The state sees immigrants as a threat to the nation and the post-1994

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nation building process. It conceptualizes most immigrants as Africans and Africans as potentially the most dangerous of all ‘aliens’” (1999, p. 296). A review of the voluminous scholarship on xenophobia reveals that there are several theses that can be used to explain how xenophobia has manifested in South Africa. First is the scapegoat thesis (Morris, 1998; Tshitereke, 1999) that locates xenophobia within the context of social transition and change. According to this thesis, there is a loathing and hatred for foreign nationals. Foreign nationals are blamed for social ills such as crime, unemployment and the spread of diseases. Second, the relative deprivation thesis (Pillay, 2008; Tshitereke, 1999) purports that dissatisfaction and frustration with the slow pace of change and inadequacies in redressing the imbalances of the apartheid past force the “deprived masses” to turn against foreigners. Third, the isolation theory (Morris, 1998) contends that apartheid insulated South African citizens from nationalities beyond Southern Africa, and foreigners represent the unknown to South Africans. And fourth, the biocultural theory (Harris, 2002) locates xenophobia at the level of visible difference, or otherness, that is exhibited in terms of physical phenotypic factors and cultural differences exhibited by African foreigners in the country. South African nationalism is another theory offered by Neocosmos (2008, p. 6) to explain anti-African xenophobia. He offers a rural/urban binary explanation, arguing that apartheid ruralized and devalued Black lives while urbanizing and valuing Whiteness. This binary, he claims, has shifted to the African/South African polarities whereby African is seen as rural and backward and South African as urban and modern and lends to the belief in “citizenship as autochthony.” All five of the abovementioned theses can be used to explain xenophobia in South Africa, with the explanatory power of one not negating the explanatory power of another.

Xenophobic Mayhem of 2008 On the evening of Sunday, 11 May 2008, a gang of young men in Johannesburg’s Alexandra township forced their way into a hostel and initiated a merciless attack on residents they deemed to be “foreigners.” From this spark, the murder, rape, and looting directed at the bodies and belongings of non-South Africans spread within days from Alexandra’s informal settlements to Diepsloot and the East Rand, where a Mozambican man was burned alive while bystanders laughed. Soon thereafter similar attacks began to unfold in the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern and Western Cape. South African citizens speaking the ‘wrong’ languages—XiTsonga or SiPedi, for example—were also subjected to violent as-

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sault. (XiTsonga and SiPedi are both official South African languages, but are spoken beyond South Africa’s boundaries as well as within; isiZulu is the predominant African language in the province of KwaZulu-Natal and Xhosa is the predominant African language in the province of the Eastern and Western Cape.) By the time the violence subsided in early June, some 52 people had died, a third of them native-born South Africans. The rationale for these latter deaths could have been misidentification as foreigners or some version of counter-attacks/self-defense on the part of non-South Africans. Hundreds of immigrants had suffered grievous injuries and tens of thousands had been displaced from their homes, taking shelter in community halls and police stations, or fleeing in terror across international borders to uncertain futures (Coplan, 2008). The perpetrators of the xenophobic violence were native-born Black (African) South Africans. Xenophobic attacks were not unknown in South Africa before the May 2008 attacks, but the 2008 attacks were, per Verryn (2008), distinctive in several respects. First, the attacks were on Black foreign nationals. There is no record that any Whites or Indians being caught up in these attacks. Second, it was mainly the poorer and more vulnerable foreign nationals that were exposed to the most vicious onslaught. Third, at least a third of the people killed were South African. And fourth, the violence was visited on the particularly marginalized of society, intertwining class, political power, and xenophobic connotations. The perpetrators of the violence in May explicitly targeted the makwerekwere—people who were identified as not properly belonging to the South African nation (Adesanmi, 2008).3 These xenophobic attacks included violent verbal and physical acts being directed towards Black immigrants by their Black South African counterparts who often erroneously perceived their Black immigrant peers’ lack of familiarity with so-called “South African norms” as stances of intentionally distancing themselves from Black South Africans. Hassim, Kupe, and Worby (2008, p. 16) argue that the “rainbow nation” (a popular image promoted as a symbol of post-apartheid South Africa) was usurped and replaced by “the onion,” with the onion representing a way of imagining degrees of national belonging, layered around a purportedly authentic core. The fragile outer skin is made up of black African immigrants: Somalians, Congolese, Zimbabweans. Beneath that fragile exterior—so easily exfoliated and discarded—lie the Tsonga, Shangaan, Venda, and Pedi, people with a firmer claim to inclusion, but on the periphery of the political heartland and therefore of dubious loyalty to the national project. In the vortex of the attacks, those testing for authenticity and looking for deserving victims used the Old Testament technique of the shibboleth, demanding of those whose true nationality re-

The Construction of Immigrant Student Identities    11 mained in doubt to correctly render the IsiZulu word for elbow—indololwane— or face the brutal consequences. (Hassim et al., 2008, p. 16)

The attackers’ operative logic was that the truth of the accused traitor’s identity could only be diagnosed through a close examination of skin color and physiognomy and through the test of linguistic facility (i.e., the shibboleth). This ethnonationalist diagnostic was only applied to Black Africans, primarily the poorer and more vulnerable foreigners. Whites and Indians, both foreign-born and native-born, were safe from these attacks. The targeted foreigners were betrayed by their allegedly darker skin and were persecuted by fellow South African Blacks who saw their own lighter skin as the most telling signifier of South African belonging. There seemed to be an agonizing misrecognition of the “true” enemy, a kind of historical amnesia of the race-based atrocities of Whites that had long pitted various marginalized populations against each other. This “shack on shack violence” (Hassim et al., 2008, p. 16) betrayed fundamental values of community, inclusion, and ubuntu4 and confirmed just how far South Africa remained from the democratic society imagined by those who wrote the new Constitution in the 1990s. To frame this in terms of the policy/practice-interface focus of this book series, the policy and practice imagined by those Constitution writers differed markedly from the practices and experiences of the established and newcomer South Africans who led or were enmeshed in this violence. This text chronicles newcomer youths’ negotiation of schools with this xenophobic backlash as background context.

Race and Identity The problem of identity has been theorized through different competing paradigms. The two most relevant theoretical frameworks that have a bearing on this study are critical race theory (CRT) and figures of identification (Hall, 1996). This section outlines CRT and figures of identification as the theoretical frameworks of this study and highlights their relevance to the inquiry of immigrant students’ experiences in constructing, negotiating, and representing their identities in the South African schooling context. CRT provides a theoretical framework through which individu­ ally and institutionally motivated racist acts can be highlighted, critiqued, and corrected (Cadwell, 1996; Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, & Thomas, 1995; Delgado, 1995; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Lynn, 1999; Tate, 1993; Tyson, 2003). CRT distinguishes between individual racism and institutional racism. It is an important construct for understanding Black immigrants who have made South Africa their home. It sheds light on the fact that Black immigrants are racialized as “Black” in South Africa, despite their varied

12    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

self-identifications on the basis of nation­ality, ethnicity, language, and other cultural signifiers. Thus, Black immigrants are subjected to the same racial prejudices and discrimination as their native Black counterparts (Awokoya & Clark, 2008), as well as being subject to the xenophobia previously mentioned. The concern of CRT is to re-narrativize the globalization story in a way that places historically marginalized parts of the world at the center rather than the periphery of the education and globalization debate. This re-narrativization, in turn, is ultimately a vehicle for realizing social change (Amnesty International, 2000). According to CRT, there are two primary types of racism: individual racism and institutional racism. CRT pivots on four primary tenets. First, it rejects claims towards neutrality, objectivity, color-blindness, and meritocracy, arguing that these notions systematically devalue Blackness and Brownness by privileging and normalizing Whiteness. Second, it asserts that racism is an embedded and institutionalized facet of society and, thus, is found at the core of its political, economic, and social structures. Third, it argues that liberalism has been and always will be, at best, a “band-aid” type of approach to remedy civil rights-oriented injustices. And, fourth, it uses autobiography and autobiographical narrative, by and/or about people of color, to discuss larger societal issues (Crenshaw et al. 1995; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001). The figures of identification as propounded by Hall (1996) are comprised of difference, fragmentation, hybridity, border, and Diaspora. Difference is constituted through a logic in which the subject is constructed in an “adversarial space,” living in “anxiety of contamination by its other” (Huyssen, 1986, p. vii). Fragmentation emphasizes the multiplicity of identities and of positions within any apparent identity. Hybridity is used it to describe an “in-between place inhabited by the subaltern” (Bhabha, 2004, p. 85). Diaspora identities are those that are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference, with reference to a non-local geography. These figures of identification will be used to help explain how Black immigrant students identified in the South African context.

Transnationalism and Identity The concepts of “transnationalism” and “transnational social fields” have been used for understanding and describing immigrant students’ identities (Zúñiga & Hamann, 2009). The term transnationalism has been described as the “process by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement” (Basch, Glick-Schiller, & Szanton-Blanc, 1994, p. 6). This term is used to allude to

The Construction of Immigrant Student Identities    13

the social fields immigrants construct across geographic, cultural, and political borders. The focus is on the role of social networks and cross-border linkages in precipitating, reinforcing, and entrenching transnational migration and eventually integration. Smith and Guarnizo (1998) claim that transnationalism is a multifaceted and complex process that is embedded in power relations that affect practices across borders: It is a process that involves the “transterritorialization of a complex array of socioeconomic and political asymmetries, hegemonic discourses, and contradictory cultural practices and identities, which center around the formation and reconstitution of the nationstate” (1998, p. 27). Glick-Schiller and Fouron (1999, p. 344) advance the concept of “transnational social fields” to describe the whole terrain of interlocking transnational relationships and networks. In several publications (e.g., Hamann, 2001; Hamann & Zúñiga, 2011a, 2011b; Hamann, Zúñiga, & Sánchez García, 2006; and Zúñiga & Hamann, 2009), Hamann and Zúñiga have emphasized that, in the face of ever-greater globalization, schools remain staunchly national or subnational (not international). From the literature, we formulated a number of assumptions (Sutton & Staw, 1995) relevant to the current study. First, immigrant students’ ethnic identity is a key factor in the way they adaptively respond to challenges in their new country (Becker, 1990; Phinney, 2007). Second, the majority of immigrant children, coming from a variety of countries and social classes, arrive with extremely positive attitudes towards schooling and education (Bankston & Zhou, 2002). Third, the social context is essential in predicting which identity is constructed (Flores-González, 2002; Suárez-Orozco, 2000). Fourth, youth cultivate multiple identities that are required to function in diverse, often incommensurable cultural realities (Becker, 1990; Phinney, 2007; Suárez-Orozco, 2004). Fifth, the ability to join the mainstream unnoticed is more challenging when one is racially marked (Wu, 2002). And sixth, contexts, opportunities, networks, and social mirroring act as powerful gravitational fields that shape the adaptation of immigrant children (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 1995).

Our Participants So, having traced the historic, geographic, linguistic, psychological, and political dynamics that have all shaped the environments negotiated by our participants, it makes sense to give a preview of who these participants were, before explicating the design of our study and the structure of the remainder of the volume. The vignettes at the beginning began this depiction, but Figure 1.1 further illuminates the geographies of the immigrant students

14    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

whose accounts we attempt to depict. Although they represent 14 countries and two continents, we encountered them all at just three schools, schools that we refer to as Opulence High, Median High, and Paucity High. Those pseudonyms are intended to highlight the differences in resource bases among the three schools.

Paradigms, Design, and Methodology Meta-theoretically we were drawn to the tenets that govern social constructivism, as our worldview and those tenets shaped the choice of procedures employed in the study (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). This paradigm advocates

Figure 1.1  Distribution of immigrant learners. Note: Country of origin of immigrant learners is indicated and population number predominantly located in South African city is indicated in bracket.

The Construction of Immigrant Student Identities    15

that reality exists through people’s subjective social experiences of the world. Here, this paradigm afforded us the opportunity to interpret how immigrant students constructed, negotiated, and represented their identities in South African schools. Phrased another way, we explored the experiences of participants in their local context. The research lens we utilized also identifies us as qualitative inquirers. It shaped our decisions and sense-making of how long we remained in the research field, whether data collection was saturated with respect to themes and categories, and how the analysis of data would advance into narratives to support the argument (Creswell & Miller, 2000). According to Lincoln and Guba (1985, p. 221), “[R]esearch design is the plan, structure, and strategy of investigation conceived so as to obtain answers to research questions and to control variance.” Design, therefore, encompasses all that the researcher does (from writing the research problem and questions, selecting cases, sampling participants, and gathering and analyzing data). Figure 1.2 gives a synopsis of the research design, strategy of inquiry, and phases of inquiry. Subsequently, a brief summary of the research process and phases of inquiry is outlined.

The Research Process and Phases of Inquiry We used an exploratory qualitative design aligned to a social constructivist paradigm in this study. The cases for the study were drawn from schools with Black immigrant students. We purposefully selected three schools from diverse sociocultural settings for maximum variation (Glesne, 2006; Patton, 1990). These schools, all located in the Gauteng province of South Africa, included a relatively privileged former model C school,5 an inner-city school,6 and a former Indian school.7 (See Carter, 2012, for a good review of differences in types of schools in South Africa.) Research sites (schools) were initially identified by analyzing statistical data from the Gauteng Department of Education (Department of Education, 2007). However, in reality, the schools identified by the official statistics proved to be poor fits for the study and actual research sites were identified by referrals made from school principals. The purposeful selection of immigrant student participants (n  =  45) for the study was done through defined criteria based on race, country of origin, gender, grade, and age. Principals (n = 3) at each school, teachers (n = 18), parents (n = 9), indigenous students (n = 12), and members of the school governing bodies (n = 9) were also purposefully selected as essential participants to interview. To clarify, indigenous students here references students who were born and raised in South Africa.

16    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

Figure 1.2  Research design, strategy of inquiry, and data collection methods.

Semi-structured, face-to-face interviews (Fontana & Frey, 2005) were the main vehicle for data collection. We also conducted in-classroom and outside-of-classroom observations of immigrant students in which we positioned ourselves as reactive observers (Angrosino, 2005). Interviews and classroom observations took place over a period of twelve months. We also

The Construction of Immigrant Student Identities    17

used field notes to record observations (Fontana & Frey, 2005) and used researcher journals to remain focused on the research problem (Hebert, 2002). Documents were also seen as empirical material (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005) and therefore analyzed. We analyzed data using constructivist grounded theory methods (Charmaz, 2001; Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2000; Sandelowski, 2000). Codes were generated from data analysis software (Atlas.Ti) and continuously modified by the treatment of the data “to accommodate new data and new insights about those data” (Sandelowski, 2000, p. 338). The extensive codes were further analyzed a priori to identify data related to key concepts in the research questions and through open coding (Miles & Huberman, 1994). This was a reflexive and interactive process that yielded extensive codes, themes, and categories. We conducted multiple readings of the data, organizing codes and themes into higher levels of categories within and across the interviews, observations, and other sources of data (Merriam, 1998). Figure 1.3 provides a diagrammatic representation of the research process that was followed in this study.

Enhancing the Quality of the Study In an attempt to enhance the quality of this study we attended to issues of dependability, authenticity, credibility, confirmability, and transferability (Creswell & Miller, 2000). As we understand the social constructivist lens, reality is socially constructed, so that which we see is our interpretation and that which others report to us is their interpretation of social experiences of the world (Gasson, n.d.). Emerging from this view of the world, we endeavored to ensure that findings were dependable and authentic. Thus we make explicit the processes through which our findings were derived. In this regard we maintained an audit trail by defining in detail the procedures that we employed in data collection and analysis. For authenticity, we ensured that findings were related to the main participants in the research context, namely Black immigrant students. According to Creswell and Miller (2000), credibility refers to the extent to which different stakeholders may make the same inferences from the data and the extent to which the researcher represents the reality from the viewpoint of participants, other researchers, and external peers. The choice of validity procedures for a study is dependent on the researcher’s lens and paradigmatic assumptions (Creswell & Miller, 2000). In this study we attempted to reflect accurately on participants’ accounts of social phenomena and to ensure that our renderings of their accounts were seen as credible by them. In this regard we employed various procedures (Creswell

18    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

Figure 1.3  Research process.

& Miller 2000; Guba, 1981) to ensure credibility. These included triangulating across data sources and methods, noting instances of disconfirming evidence, keeping a reflective journal, member checking (i.e., checking in-

The Construction of Immigrant Student Identities    19

terpretations with the students we studied), maintaining an audit trail, and describing context, participants, and themes in rich and thick detail. Although no study can provide findings that are universally transferable, the aim of research is to produce information that can be shared and applied beyond the study context to other settings (Guba, 1981). In this regard we collected rich and thick data that may permit comparison of these study contexts to other possible contexts, and we overtly compare and contrast our work with that of others who have studied the school experiences of newcomers across the globe. To enhance transferability, we provided thick description of the study context such as demographics of the participants. Furthermore, we employed purposeful sampling that was not intended to be typical or representative. Thus, descriptions, notions, and theories within the specified settings may be used for transferability without the findings of the study necessarily being transferable. In an attempt to represent findings that reflected participants’ experiences (and not ours) within the context of the study, we used a method of constant reflexivity. In applying the construct of confirmability (Gasson, n.d.; Guba, 1981) we acknowledged our implicit influences, beliefs, and biases as part of a social context that may affect the phenomenon under study and our analysis of it. To limit our biases and prejudices in the social context, we recorded our reflections in a researcher journal. Triangulation of data, as already noted in credibility, was also applied as a strategy for confirmability. Quality criteria are addressed comprehensively in chapter three.

Scope and Limitations This study embraced an instrumental case study approach to provide insight into how these Black immigrant students constructed, negotiated, and represented their identities in South African schools, without trying to draw larger generalizations beyond the context of this study (Stake, 2005). The focus of the study was on experiences of Black immigrant students in three secondary schools, but through our chronicling of their experiences we also gain insight into how educational policies, both formal and improvisational, were constructed, enacted, and experienced by these students and others in their settings. For the purposes of triangulation of data, teachers, principals, members of the SGB, and a sample of indigenous learners were also interviewed. We followed qualitative research methods as a systematic and reflective process for the generation of new knowledge that may be contested, shared, or imply transferability beyond the current study context (Malterud, 2001). As such, the insights gleaned here could inform educational integration policy and illuminate the experiences of other Black

20    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

immigrant students in these and other South African schools. This is so not because we are claiming generalizability per se, but rather because the particularities of depicted student experiences serve as a reminder of the hazards of the generalizations that are so often replete in educational environments and embedded in educational policies.

Ethical Considerations Just like any research that involves human behavior, measures were taken to ensure that all ethical concerns with regard to voluntary participation, informed consent, confidentially, and anonymity were adhered to (Christians, 2005; Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2006). Care was therefore taken to protect the personal dignity and confidentiality of Black immigrant students who were the main participants in the study. Christians (2005, p. 144) suggests that participants must agree to voluntarily participate “without coercion” with “full and open” disclosure of information by the researcher. This was achieved through an introductory interview explaining the objectives, the nature of the study, and how results would be released and used. We then allowed participants to check and confirm their (inter)views before reporting in the study (Lemmer & van Wyk, 2004; Moss, 2004). Furthermore, no actual names of participants were indicated in reporting their views and practices. Additionally, before entering the field, we first sought the permission from the relevant department of education in Gauteng Province in South Africa. Next, we solicited the approval of principals and school governing bodies at various research sites. Then, still before conducting interviews and observations, we sought participating teachers’ approval as well as the approval of parents of identified learners. Finally, learners were given letters of consent (to sign or not sign) explaining their expected level of participation. Those who signed it agreed that their participation was voluntary and maintained a right to withdraw from the study at any time without giving any explanation. Of course, only those who signed consent forms were included in this final report.

Outline of Remaining Chapters Accounts from those who agreed to participate in the study form the bulk of the remainder of this volume. Chapter 2 focuses on the review of the literature on transnationally mobile students and their school experiences. A core interest in the review of the literature is to establish what is already known in the field about our proposed study and to position us to identify how the South African context is like/unlike other settings with school-age

The Construction of Immigrant Student Identities    21

newcomer populations. The review was primarily undertaken to identify the debates in the field with particular interest in existing gaps and silences in the field that gave relevance to this study. Chapter 3 presents the findings of the study and draws on the emerging themes that were identified through data analysis. It is through these themes that experiences of immigrant students are narrated. Principally, the research question of how immigrant students constructed, negotiated, and represented their identities in South African schools is addressed. Chapter 4 focuses on analyzing data obtained from immigrant students as a unit of analysis. The chapter ends with a juxtaposition of participants’ accounts and what the literature has already identified as it pertains to immigrant students. The final chapter summarizes the key findings and foregrounds these findings against the theoretical framework of this study. The research assumptions are then revisited in light of findings of this study. New knowledge that emerged from this study, particularly about the education policy/practice interface as it pertains to newcomer students, and suggestions for further research are presented. The chapter concludes with recommendations for policy implementation and research to improve teaching and learning. So, as the following chapters detail, there were many challenges facing Black immigrants in South Africa as a whole as the second decade of the 21st century began. The most pertinent of all seems to be playing out in the “youthscapes” (Maira & Soep, 2004) of South African schools where black immigrant students are attempting to forge their identities. These “youthscapes” represent a hotly contested terrain where the emotional, social, and educational well-being of Black immigrant students are challenged by native-born youths and others who assert that the benefits of post-apartheid South Africa’s democratic turn should accrue to themselves first, not to the newcomers. Acknowledging that South Africa also faces the challenge of enrolling other students in its schools who also face obstacles (e.g., low expectations) and that Black immigrant versus Black native obscures other factors related to the aspiration that South African schools can help create a more just, inclusive, and prosperous nation, this research analysis seeks to offer a basis for changing these dire realities.

Notes 1. Referencing the apartheid era solidarity of all non-Whites as “Black,” Black immigrant students refers to both non-White immigrants who come from African countries, to descendants of any of the people of Africa, and to Indian immigrants who hail from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

22    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities 2. The terms Colored, White, Indian, and African derive from the apartheid racial classifications of the different peoples of South Africa. The use of these terms, although problematic, has continued through the post-apartheid era in the country. In this book, we use these terms grudgingly to help present the necessary context for our work. 3. Makwerekwere is a derogatory term used by Black South Africans to describe other Africans. It is used here with some hesitation. However, it figures prominently in later accounts of both immigrant students and native-born students and educators, so avoiding it would also be problematic. 4. Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning “humanity to others.” It also means “I am what I am because of who we all are.” 5. Former Model C schools were public schools (classified prior to 1994) catering mainly to White learners. In what was a government attempt to cut state costs by shifting some of the financing and control of White schools to parents, Model C schools were allowed to charge fees for attendance. So Model C schools, although ostensibly public, can be prohibitively costly for most prospective learners and are also better resourced on a per-enrollee basis. Many schools now charge fees usually in the $20–$100 dollar range/year, but Model C schools sometimes top $3000 (sums are converted to U.S. dollars for readers’ convenience). 6. Inner city school: A school in the heart of a business area in the city center that mushroomed to cater to the needs of Black students who resided within the city center. 7. Former Indian schools were public schools (classified prior to 1994) catering primarily to Indians (per the “logic” of apartheid).

2 The Architecture of Identity

Each individual is the synthesis not only of existing relations, but of the history of these relations. He is a précis of the past. —Gramsci, cited in Rutherford 1990, p. 20

Introduction The chapter begins with a review of research on immigrant students’ identities, first by “theorizing identity” and then focusing on how identity is “negotiated” within the currents of a complex society. The conceptual markers of “transnationalism” and “transnational social fields” were utilized in this study as vehicles for understanding and describing immigrant identities, but they are not the only salient factors. These students were marked by gender, racial, and age-related taxonomies and, in turn, they constructed senses of self as related to these as well. The rest of the chapter presents a discussion of two theoretical perspectives—critical race theory and figures of identification—that will guide our subsequent review of the data. Adolescence is a critical stage in human development in which individuals struggle with their self-concept, interpersonal relationships, and future occupational prospects (Lerner, Wertlieb, & Jacobs, 2003). Although Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities, pages 23–44 Copyright © 2015 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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24    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

this development phase is a social construction rather than a “natural fact” (Nichols & Good, 2003; Youniss, 1983), adolescence is pervasively understood as the life stage in which the individual experiences “increased desire for independence, sexual maturation, greater cognitive ability, greater pressure to conform to social norms, and heightened awareness of what others think of them” (Spencer, Jordan, Logel, & Zanna, 2005, p. 127). Furthermore, adolescence is a period during which relations with peers become more important, as youth move away from relying on parents to define who they are (Lerner et al., 2003). Thus, constructing, negotiating, and understanding different aspects of one’s identity are important facets of adolescence. A review of the voluminous literature has revealed some of the basic tenets that constitute identity. According to Robinson (1999), identity refers to both visible and invisible domains of the self that influence self-construction. Identity includes, but is not limited to, ethnicity, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, and physical and intellectual ability. SuárezOrozco (2004) argues that the process of identity exploration among adolescents involves not only aspects of personal development (relationships, work choices, examining values), but also culture-related contrasts pertaining to these choices. Identity, as Erikson (1968) noted, refers to “a process located in the core of the individual and yet also in the core of his [or her] communal culture” (p. 22). According to Jenkins (2004), identities are generated in and constructed through a kind of internal (self-attributed) and external (other-ascribed) dialectic conditioned within specific social worlds. This holds for both personal and collective identities, which should be understood as always closely entangled with each other. For immigrant students, both the individual and the communal culture are central to identity formation (Phinney, 2007). When immigrants leave one culture and settle in another, they experience tension with regard to who they are and who they will become in the host country. Their ethnic identity, that is, their sense of belonging to their culture of origin, is a key factor in the way they adaptively respond to challenges in their new country. This is true in both the larger long-term sense of negotiating a new country and the more micro day-to-day decisions about how to affiliate with others. For example, Becker (1990) described immigrant students’ quotidian bids to seem mainstream (and higher status) by wearing popular clothes styles, avoiding use of their first language, and hiding accents (Hamann & England, 2011). The circumstances of the migration also shape both identity and available identities. Ogbu (1987) distinguished between voluntary and involuntary minorities, noting that the former tended to fare much better at school.

The Architecture of Identity    25

An understanding of the multiple pathways that lead to the development of a secure ethnic identity, the ways these pathways may change with time, and the other factors that influence positive or negative identity, is thus crucial. Dion (2006) argues that understanding the dynamics of identity development in immigrant children—for example, the role of family intergenerational consensus and conflict—would help to reveal the nature of these identity constructions. It is therefore important to consider how theories of identity development can be applied to understanding the challenges faced by immigrant students, challenges that manifest themselves at school, but also in other facets of these youngsters’ lives.

Theorizing Identity A number of scholars claim that identity goes through a variety of permutations during adolescence as the individual experiments with different identity strategies (e.g., Marcia, 1980; Murrell, 1999; Parham, 1989; Phinney & Ong, 2007; Sirin & Fine, 2008; Suárez-Orozco, 2004). Some argue that all youth move steadily from a stage of ethnic or racial “unawareness” to one of “exploration” to a final stage of an “achieved” sense of racial or ethnic identity (Erikson, 1968; Marcia, 1966). Others assert that the process of identity formation is, rather than being linear, more accurately described as “spiraling” back to revisit previous stages, each time from a different vantage point (Parham, 1989). Still others claim that identity is “an internal self-constructed, dynamic organization of drives, abilities, beliefs, and individual history” (Marcia, 1980, p. 159) that facilitates psychological differentiation from others, a sense of emerging identity characterized by “a flexible unity” that makes an individual less likely to rely on others views and expectations for self-definition. The latter view, as proposed by Marcia (1980, p. 160), pivots on four different “identity statuses,” with the optimal being “identity achievement.” This involves a period of personal reflection and consideration of alternatives, then making commitments based on individual choices. His other identity statuses were “diffusion” (unable to make commitments), “foreclosed” (making commitments but based on parental/family influence, rather than personal choice), and “moratorium” (transitional phase trying to decide on and resolve commitments). In this phase of the lifespan, key issues for consideration concern occupational choices and issues of ideology/worldviews (such as religious and political beliefs). According to Marcia (1980), identity search involves questioning earlier worldviews and values, many of which have been acquired from the family. The concept of “identity foreclosure” indicates acceptance of others’ views without questioning and thus is not regarded as the ideal developmental outcome.

26    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

Erikson (1968) proposed a stage-specific model of identity formation that involves giving up certain earlier identifications to achieve the autonomy, coherence, and independence that “identity” confers. He argued that identity is less challenging when there is continuity among the various social milieus youth encounter. Central to his view was the idea of a “moratorium,” enabling the adolescent to consolidate different facets of identity, with “identity confusion” resulting only when attempts at integration did not succeed. Psychologist Carola Suárez-Orozco (2004) challenges the view held by Erikson and argues that identity formation is not simply a process by which one passes through a variety of stages on the way to achieving a stable identity. Rather, it is a process that is fluid and contextually driven. As her anthropologist partner Marcelo Suárez-Orozco (2000) asserts, the social context is essential in predicting which identity is constructed. Carola Suárez-Orozco argues that there is a need to reframe the Eriksonian model of identity formation and development in light of new global forces and realities. In a global world, identity is no longer best conceived as an achievement that involves overcoming or giving up certain cultural identifications. Instead, youth who are players in a global stage must cultivate the multiple identities that are required to function in diverse, often incommensurable cultural realities. Rather than theorizing identity as oriented toward either the home culture or the host culture, many immigrant students today are articulating and performing complex multiple identifications that involve bringing together disparate cultural streams. Immigrant students are constantly reinventing and rediscovering themselves through interactions with social structures, particularly peer reference groups and institutionally circumscribed roles, values, and ideologies. Among these social worlds, inconsistencies in the codes, values, roles, or expectations add to the difficulty of identity development (Hamann & Zúñiga, 2011b; Zúñiga & Hamann, 2009). Thus, the construction and negotiation of identity does not take place in a vacuum but in a context of social worlds constituted by school, peer reference groups, and communal culture. This means that identity is socially constructed. It is an interaction between internal psychological processes and external processes of categorization and evaluation imposed by others. The social context is thus essential in predicting which identity is constructed and how (Suárez-Orozco, 2000). Erikson (1968) proposed that the single most important task of adolescence was the development of a coherent sense of identity. The crafting of an identity involved exploration and experimentation with a number of identity possibilities and sociocultural factors that influenced behavior, thinking, and development of self. Erikson (1968) proposed the concept

The Architecture of Identity    27

of “identity crisis” to describe the emotional and psychological stressors and challenges that push individuals to change conceptions of themselves and the world around them. The individual’s identity emerges from these challenges and conflicts. According to Erikson’s theoretical model, for positive development to occur, there needs to be a “good fit between individuals’ sense of self and the varied social milieus he or she has to navigate” (cited in Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001, p. 92). However, Erikson’s model cannot fully account for the experiences of youths who must navigate increasingly heterogeneous social spaces. Building on Erikson’s (1968) model, others have proposed that identity development is an ongoing process that does not progress in a linear fashion, with the achievement of a stable adult identity as the end goal (Lemer et al., 2003; Phinney, 1990, Spencer, 2003). Rather, individuals move across and within different identity domains, shifting and reevaluating their self-conception not only during adolescence, but throughout the human lifespan (Spencer et al., 2005). For adolescents who are members of a subordinated or marginalized ethnic or racial group, positive identity formations may be more challenging, particularly if they receive consistent negative messages from the mainstream society (Bailey, 2000; Helms, 2003; Nieto, 2000; Ogbu, 1987; Portes & Rumbaut, 2001). The perceptions and attitudes that those in power have towards immigrants of color and Black people can shape self-conceptions (Helms, 1995) in ways that are consequential for orientation toward and activity at school.

Negotiating the Currents of a Complex Society At no time in the lifespan is the urge to define oneself with reference to the society as great as during adolescence. According to Erikson (1968), the single greatest developmental task of adolescence is to forge a coherent sense of identity. He argued that for optimal development, there needs to be a complementarity between the individual’s sense of self and the varied social milieus he or she must negotiate. In an attempt to understand the way in which immigrant students’ identities developed in the context of their experience at school and, more broadly, in society, this research study leaned on sociocultural (Cole, 1996; Engestrom, 1999; Rogoff, 2003; Wenger, 1998) and ecological theories (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, 1993; Lerner, 1991; Spencer, 2006). Both these theories share central tenets: First, cultural activities and practices are central in the developmental trajectories of individuals. Second, cultural practices and activities are recurring, goal-directed activities that involve two or more people. Third, developmental processes are deeply informed by the

28    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

social context, through the organization of activities that people participate in, and through the values, norms, and expectations conveyed in those activities (Gonzalez, 1999; Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003; Nasir, 2004/2009). Fourth, the social context is layered in nature since it involves both immediate (proximal) contexts, such as activities or cultural practice, and also more distant contexts, such as institutions and society (Bronfenbrenner, 1993). And fifth, identities are situated, local, and historically bound in nature (Becker, 1990; Wenger, 1998). These theories provide an important framework for considerations of identity, as identities are innately social and identity meanings are part of culturally construed worlds (Holland, Lachicotte, & Cain, 1998). Given this understanding of identity, Nasir, McLaughlin, and Jones (2009) make a number of claims regarding racial and ethnic identities, namely that racial and ethnic identities take on meaning within racial and ethnic groups, yet these identities are also fluid over individuals, time, and space. Racial and ethnic identities are inextricably tied to participation in institutions by means of enactment through the norms, conventions, and available roles within these institutions. And racial and ethnic identities are informed by broader societal conceptions about what racial group membership means, such as racial stereotypes. It is these broader societal conceptions that constitute ideational artifacts (Cole, 1996; Nasir, 2004) that get taken up and acted upon in local settings. Social interactionism (Blumer, 1969) argues that who we are is fundamentally shaped by our participation in the social world and by our social interactions with those around us through which particular values, norms, and expectations are conveyed. Our sense of self is substantively if not entirely constructed by the expectations that others have of us. Identities are negotiated within a particular social context and milieu, and social reality is created and negotiated by people through the names and meanings (symbols) they attach to things when communicating with one another. The social interactionism frame of identity allows us to better understand how students develop conceptions of themselves as they participate in multiple settings of their lives, including schools (Nasir, 2004). In an increasingly heterogeneous transnational world, there is much less complementarity between social spaces (Suárez-Orozco, 2000). Currently, theorists are less concerned with theorizing identity as a coherent, monolithic, and enduring construct than in understanding how identities are implicated in the ability to transverse increasingly discontinuous social, symbolic, and political spheres. These discontinuous social, symbolic, and political spheres create a social climate and ethos of reception within which the social mirror, psychosocial passing, immigrant stress, and identity manifestations and pathways are all enacted.

The Architecture of Identity    29

The Social Climate and Ethos of Reception Identities are constituted, represented, and negotiated within social contexts. These social contexts generate a particular ethos of reception that plays a critical role in the adaptation of immigrant students (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001). Intolerance for immigrants is a too common response all over the world. Discrimination against immigrants of color is particularly widespread and intense in many areas (Tatum, 1997). Immigrants coming to South Africa are more diverse than ever before in terms of ethnicity, skin color, and religion and are particularly subject to the pervasive social trauma of prejudice and social exclusion (Hassim et al., 2008). The exclusion of immigrant students can take structural as well as attitudinal forms (Suárez-Orozco, 2004). Such structural barriers and the social ethos of intolerance and racism that are encountered by Black immigrant students serve to intensify the stresses of immigration. Although the structural exclusion suffered by immigrant students is tangibly detrimental to their ability to participate in the opportunity structure, prejudicial attitudes and psychological violence also play a toxic role.

The Social Mirror Although to a certain extent all people are influenced by what others think of them (Spencer, 2003; Spencer et al., 2005), the societal attitudes and perceptions towards people of color in some societies can present a negative social mirror (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez- Orozco, 2001). Winnicott (1971) suggests that a child’s sense of self is profoundly shaped by the reflections mirrored back to him by significant others. Indeed, all human beings are dependent upon the reflection of themselves mirrored by others (Suárez-Orozco, 2000). When the reflected image is generally positive, the individual is able to feel that she is worthwhile and competent. When the reflection is generally negative, it is extremely difficult to maintain an unblemished sense of self-worth. Taylor argues: Identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or a group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirrors back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. (1994, p. 50)

In such cases, Black immigrants experience what Du Bois (1903/1989) referred to as “double consciousness-a sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world

30    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

that looks on in . . . contempt and pity” (as cited in Suárez-Orozco & SuárezOrozco, 2001, p. 99). Essed and Goldberg (2001, p. 5) argue that: “Double-consciousness” is a complex and constant play between the exclusionary conditions of social structure marked by race and the psychological and cultural strategies employed by the racially excluded and marginalized to accommodate themselves to every indignities as well as to resist them.

When the expectations (irrespective of their contradictions) are of laziness, irresponsibility, low intelligence, and even danger, the outcome can be toxic. Winnicott (1971, p. 134), in articulating his concept of mirroring, argued, “The mother functions as a mirror, providing the infant with a precise reflection of his own experience and gestures, despite their fragmented and formless qualities. When I look I am seen, so I exist.” When these reflections are received in a number of mirrors, including the media, the classroom, and the street, and the reflections are pejorative or demeaning, the outcomes can be devastating (Adam, 1990). Immigrant children respond to and attach meaning to this negative social mirror in a number of ways. They may become resigned to the negative reflections, leading to sense of hopelessness and self-deprecation that may, in turn, result in low aspirations and self-defeating behaviors (Suárez-Orozco, 2004). This can manifest as a self-fulfilling prophecy of self-doubt and shame (Winnicott, 1971). Of course, in scenarios where both the native born and newcomers are racialized (and viewed in pejorative fashion by the elite), each may contribute to the other’s negative framing with bilateral damage for both Black natives and Black newcomers. Imperfections in the reflected rendition inhibit the child’s capacity for self-experience and integration and interfere with the process of personalization (Greenberg & Mitchell 1983). In contrast, a child whose accomplishments are mirrored favorably is likely to feel more valuable than the child whose accomplishments are either largely ignored or, worse still, denigrated. Suárez-Orozco (2000) claims that, although the concept of mirroring offers an important contribution to our understanding of the developing child, Winnicott (1971) overlooks the powerful forces of social systems and culture in shaping self–other relationships. Particularly as the child develops, the mirroring function is by no means the exclusive domain of maternal figures. In fact, with the sometime exception of individuals falling on the autistic spectrum, all human beings are dependent upon the reflection of themselves mirrored back to them by others. When the reflected opinion

The Architecture of Identity    31

is generally positive, the individual will feel worth and competence. When the reflection is generally negative, it is extremely difficult to maintain an unblemished sense of self-worth for very long. Even when parents provide positive mirroring, it is often insufficient to compensate for the distorted mirrors that children encounter in their daily lives. However, in some cases, the immigrant parent is considered out of touch with reality or deficient (e.g., Villenas, 2002). Even when the parents’ opinions are considered valid, they may not be enough to compensate for the intensity and frequency of the distortions of the “house of mirrors” immigrant children encounter in their everyday lives. One strategy to bypass the effects of the social mirror is that of psychosocial passing.

Psychosocial Passing The concept of “passing” within the Black community refers to Blacks who pass for White because of their light skin color (Murrell, 1999). “Psychosocial passing” (Berry, 1997; Murrell, 1999; Nesdale, Rooney, & Smith 1997; Suárez-Orozco 2000, 2004; Wu, 2002) refers to people who seek to render invisible the visible differences between themselves and a desired or chosen reference group. By behaving in ways that are consistent with the group members of the group they seek to be identified with, they seek to avoid having their differences from the desired affiliation noticed. Phenotypic racial features have considerable implications for the ease of assimilation. For example, historically, immigrants coming from Europe to the United States could more easily assimilate once they lost their accents and changed their names. The ability to join the mainstream unnoticed is more challenging when one is racially marked. Questions as to where one is “really from” or compliments made to Asian Americans who have been in the United States for many generations on their English fluency lead to what Wu (2002) refers to as the “perpetual foreigner syndrome.” In this era of globalization, immigrants’ ability to pass or be fully assimilated unnoticed is no longer possible for most new arrivals and this can lead to undue stress.

Immigrant Stress Suárez-Orozco (2004) argues that it is not uncommon for many immigrant children to respond to the “othering” of their group with self-doubt, shame, low aspirations, and disengagement. Numerous studies reveal that individuals from marginalized groups are exposed to stress as a result of their social group affiliation (Berry, 1997; Meyer, 2003; Murrell, 1999; Nesdale et al., 1997; C. Suárez-Orozco, 2004; M. Suárez-Orozco 2000; Wu,

32    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

2002). Stress associated with immigrant status also has been widely documented in the literature as “acculturative stress” (Berry, 1997; Nesdale et al., 1997; Suárez-Orozco, 2000). Thus, stress originates not only from the prejudice and discrimination stemming from one’s minority status, but also from the developmental challenges of reconciling multiple cultural systems of reference (LaFramboise, Coleman, & Gerton, 1993).

Identity Manifestations The currents of a complex society create the contexts within which the manifestations of identity crystallize, take shape, and are endowed with meaning and value. A review of the voluminous literature reveals that immigrant student identities manifest themselves within the context of these social worlds in numerous and multiple forms: namely, achieved or ascribed identities (De Vos, 1980; Helms, 1990; C. Suárez-Orozco, 2004; M. SuárezOrozco, 2000; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001), performing identities (Maestes, 2000; Waters, 1996), global identity (Arnett, 2002), dominating identities (Murrell, 1999), ethnic identities (Phinney & Ong, 2007), and hyphenating and perforating identities (Sirin & Fine, 2008; Vandeyar, 2011). Achieved identity is the extent to which an individual achieves a sense of belonging—“I am a member of this group.” An ascribed identity is imposed either by co-ethnics—“you are a member of our group”—or by members of the dominant culture—“You are a member of that group.” For some groups, the imposed or ascribed identity is considerably stronger than for others. Waters (1999, p. 6) claims that in this “race conscious society a person becomes defined racially, and identity is imposed upon him/her by outsiders.” Immigrant students are challenged to navigate between achieved identities and ascribed or imposed identities (Suárez-Orozco & SuárezOrozco, 2001). Performing identity at its most basic level is the ethnic label an individual chooses to signify his identity (Becker, 1990; Maestes, 2000; Waters, 1996). How does an individual demonstrate her ethnic affiliation? Sociological research has used the self-selected label as a way of examining identity. Whether a second-generation person of Mexican origin calls herself Mexican or Mexican American or Latina or Chicana seems to be linked to quite different patterns of incorporation and engagement in schooling (Hamann & Zúñiga, 2011b; Matute-Bianchi, 1991; Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Waters, 1996). “Global identity manifests in the form of students who develop a bicultural identity” that incorporates elements of the local culture with an awareness of a relation to the global culture (Arnett, 2002, p. 777). The cultural

The Architecture of Identity    33

challenges of globalization affect immigrant and indigenous students in different ways. For immigrant students, the task is to braid together into a flexible sense of self elements of the parent culture, the host culture, and an emerging globalized youth culture. For indigenous students, the challenge is to broaden the cultural horizon to incorporate the changing perspectives, habits, and potentials of its diverse newcomers. For many youth, identity is less bicultural than a “complex hybrid” (Arnett, 2002, p. 778) or transcultural (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001). Although the self is comprised of multiple, shifting, and simultaneous identities, a dominating identity represents a facet of the self that is most influential in self-definition (Murrell, 1999). This identity can overshadow others and is influenced by status of the identity, by reference group affiliations, and identity development. At its core, ethnic identity is a sense of belonging to one’s ethnic group. From a developmental perspective, ethnic identity is assumed to exist in childhood in only rudimentary form, as a selflabel together with basic information about ethnicity and attitudes about one’s group derived largely from one’s parents (Bernal, Knight, Garza, & Cota, 1993). A true ethnic identity is conceptualized as developing during adolescence and early adulthood through a process of exploring one’s ethnicity and attaining a clear understanding of the meaning of one’s group membership for oneself (Phinney, 1993). More than any other social institution, the family provides the basic foundation for ethnic identity development. However, although one’s family provides the initial basis for one’s sense of ethnic group belonging, ethnic identity evolves and changes throughout life in relation to school, community, and work contexts, as well as broader contextual factors such as the density status (how many of one’s group live in a particular area) and local history of one’s ethnic group. Immigrant students typically adapt more quickly than their parents to the culture of their new society, but they nevertheless usually retain a clear and positive sense of belonging to their ethnic group over time (Berry, Phinney, Sam, & Vedder, 2006). Cross-sectional research shows that ethnic identity remains strong among second- and even third-generation immigrants (Phinney, 2003). For immigrant children, a secure sense of who they are in ethnic terms underlies psychological well-being and adjustment. Individuals who are secure in their sense of belonging to their ethnic group also hold more positive attitudes toward members of other ethnic groups (García, 2001; Phinney, Jacoby, & Silva, 2007). Thus, a strong ethnic identity can be a resource that contributes to the resilience of individuals facing the challenges of adapting to a new society.

34    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

Hyphenated identity is a term that implies a dual identity, an ethnocultural one, and evokes questions and debates regarding which side of the hyphen the person belongs to (Vandeyar, 2011). As much as the hyphen separates, it also creates a sense of belonging (Suárez-Orozco, 2004, 2008). As immigrants vacillate between two or more ethnic identities, they may experience a feeling of conflict or tension arising between affiliations. Sometimes immigrants manage to assimilate at the expense of their culture of origin, or they may fail to blend in with their new environment. In other cases, they try hard to maintain equilibrium between the two, which is not an easy thing to do and which relates to what school seems to value and the identities viably available to a given young person. To use racially hyphenated identities is to acknowledge the social construction of race and how it continues to affect the lives of immigrants. The dual identity is no myth, and the hyphen gives voice to this painful reality. At times these identities are also perforated as they are scrutinized, stretched, challenged, and threatened by larger social and political formations and by the ethos of reception of the host country (Suárez-Orozco, 2004; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001).

Identity Pathways: Styles of Adaptation A review of the extant literature reveals that there are many identity pathways that immigrant youth can choose for their attempts to fit in and adapt to the host country. These pathways are highly context dependent and fluid. At first, an immigrant student might gravitate toward one style of adaptation but, given time and changing contexts, she may take on other styles. Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco (2001) noted that immigrant students tended to gravitate towards one of the dominant styles of adaptation: namely, ethnic flight, adversarial, bi-cultural, and transcultural. These styles are not fixed or mutually exclusive, but they do offer a useful taxonomy. Contexts, opportunities, networks, and social mirroring act as powerful gravitational fields shaping the adaptation of immigrant children. The ethnic flight style is characterized by immigrant students mimicking the dominant group and sometimes attempting to join them, leaving their own ethnic group behind. (Consider the earlier discussion of “passing.”) These students minimize or even deny the negative social mirroring they encounter. Many immigrant students who opt for the ethnic flight style may feel more comfortable networking with peers from the dominant culture. Learning English for many of these immigrant students may serve not only instrumental purposes but may also represent an important symbolic act of identification with the dominant culture (Suárez-Orozco, 2004). According

The Architecture of Identity    35

to Suárez-Orozco (2004), immigrant students perceive success in school as a route for instrumental mobility and an avenue to symbolically and psychologically dissemble and gain distance from their family and ethnic groups. These immigrant students have few apparent qualms about shedding their cultural knapsack. “Making it” for these immigrant students tends to manifest itself as independence and individualistic self-advancement. Furthermore, for many of these immigrant students, culturally constituted patterns of parental authority lose legitimacy. They view their parents as being “out of it” and their ways, moral codes, values and expectations are rejected as antiquated or only pertinent elsewhere (e.g., Becker, 1990). Among some ethnic groups, merely being a good student results in peer sanctions. Peer accusations of “acting white” or being a “coconut,” “banana,” or “Oreo” (brown, yellow, or black on the outside and white on the inside) are both frequent and derogatory (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986), although research in this area is controversial and contested (e.g., Cook & Ludwig, 1998; Harpalani, 2002). In the earlier era of scholarship, this style of adaptation was termed “passing” (De Vos, 1992). Suárez-Orozco (2004) argues that while passing may have been a common style of adaptation among those who phenotypically looked like the mainstream, it is not easily available to today’s immigrants of color, who visibly look like the “other” (a topic particularly complicated in South Africa where the phenotypic majority has concurrently been “othered”). Further, while ethnic flight is a form of adaptation that can be adaptive in terms of “making it” by the mainstream society’s standards, it frequently comes at a significant social and emotional cost. In contrast, the adversarial style of adaptation is characterized by immigrant students who structure their identities around a process of rejection by institutions of the dominant culture (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986). These students respond to negative social mirroring by developing a defensively oppositional attitude and are likely to act out behaviorally (Aronowitz, 1984; Garcia-Coll & Magnuson, 1997). They often construct spaces of competence in the underground or alternative economies and develop an oppositional counterculture identity from which gangs may emerge. This process of forging a reactive ethnicity in the face of perceived threats, persecution, discrimination, and exclusion is not uncommon. It is a mode of ethnic identity formation highlighting the role of a hostile context of reception in accounting for the rise rather than the erosion of ethnicity (Aleinikoff & Ruben, 1998; Portes & Rumbaut, 2006; Rumbaut, 2005). Ogbu and Simons (1998) argued that in contexts of severe inequality and ethnic antagonism, for many immigrant students, learning standard English and classroom success may elicit severe peer group sanctioning.

36    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

The bicultural style is characterized by transnational strategies that witness immigrant students becoming cultural brokers (Wolf, 1956), mediating the often conflicting, cultural currents of home culture and host culture (LaFramboise et al., 1993; Orellana, 2009). The development of bicultural competence is facilitated by “a strong sense of oneself in relation to others,” but hindered if a person was enmeshed in his or her social context (LaFramboise et al., 1993, p. 402). The “work of culture” (to borrow a term from Obeyesekere, 1990) for these immigrant students consists of crafting identities in the “hyphen,” linking aspects of cultural systems they find themselves inhabiting. Some of these immigrant students will achieve bicultural and bilingual competencies that become an integral part of their identity. These immigrant students respond to negative social mirroring by identifying it, naming it, and resisting it. For these immigrant students, the culturally constructed social structures and patterns of social control of immigrant parents maintain a degree of legitimacy. Learning English and doing well in school are viewed as competencies that do not compromise their sense of who they are (Suárez-Orozco, 2004). These immigrant students network with ease among members of their own ethnic group as well as with members from other ethnic groups. These immigrant students perceive success as a way to pay back their parents for their sacrifices (SuárezOrozco & Suárez-Orozco, 1995; Suárez-Orozco, 1989). The transcultural style is characterized by immigrant students who creatively fuse aspects of two or more cultures—that is, home and host cultures. In so doing, they synthesize an identity that does not require them to choose between cultures, but rather that allows them to incorporate traits of different cultures while fusing additive elements (Falicov, 2002). Suárez-Orozco (2004) claims that a transcultural identity is the most adaptive style because it affords the immigrant student with an opportunity to preserve affective ties of the home culture while simultaneously acquiring competencies required to successfully cope in the new mainstream culture. With this style, the immigrant student is at ease in multiple social and cultural contexts. This identity style not only serves the individual well but also benefits the society at large. It was precisely such transcultural individuals whom Stonequist (1937, p. 15) identified more than 75 years ago as being best suited to become the “creative agents” who might “contribute to the solution of the conflict of races and cultures.” Transcultural identities are particularly adaptive in this era of globalism and multiculturalism. By acquiring competencies that enable them to operate within more than one cultural code, immigrant students are at an advantage as they move with ease within the “global economy while maintaining the social networks and connectedness essential to the human condition” (Suárez-Orozco, 2004, p. 193).

The Architecture of Identity    37

Negotiating the crosscurrents of identities can be particularly complex for immigrant students. The pathways they take and the identities they form are determined in multiple ways. Resources, experiences, stresses, and trauma, as well as the coping strategies they bring with them, all play a key role. Critical to the formation of their identities is the structural and attitudinal environment within which they find themselves. Immigrant students must not only deal with aspects of personal development shared by all adolescents (relationships, work choices, examining values), but they also often confront culture-related differences concerning these choices (Suárez-Orozco, 2004). They must seek to create a sense of identity through personal choices surrounding relationships, occupation, worldviews, and values that sometimes may conflict with parental and other family expectations (Dion, 2006; Murrell, 1999). Ultimately, they must decide how available the nation-state identities are that are promoted through schooling or how desirable they are.

Limitations in the Identity Literature A review of the voluminous literature on identity conducted by Schwartz (2005) revealed that much emphasis has been placed on the theoretical aspects of identity, but only some literature has addressed the methodological aspects, and little if any literature has paid attention to the applied aspect. Schwartz (2005) identified some weaknesses within the theoretical domain of identity literature. First he argues that the aspect of personal identity in the identity status theory (Erikson, 1968; Marcia, 1966) has not attended to the self that the individual presents to the outside world and the processes by which one presents this self to the world. He claims that identity literature has relied largely on Marcia’s (1966) identity status paradigm and Erikson’s (1968) theory of identity. According to Marcia, identity is a collaborative project between the young person and the context, and it operates on distinct levels: ego, personal, and social. Ego identity represents the innermost and most unconscious processes underlying the formation of identity (Marcia, Waterman, Matteson, Archer, & Orlofsjky, 1993). Personal identity represents goals, values, and beliefs. Social identity refers to group identifications and to one’s assigned and chosen place in the social world, as well as to processes by which one negotiates one’s way through the social world. The review of the literature on identity conducted by Schwartz (2005) revealed that the bulk of what identity status theory and research has attended to focused on personal identity. A second limitation identified by Schwartz (2005) is that identity status theory does not attend to ethnicity or nationality (Phinney, 1990). This is a major weakness, especially in

38    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

today’s global world where people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds come into contact on an everyday basis. The literature’s methodological limitations are twofold in nature. First, the majority of identity studies have been conducted with university students, and few if any with younger adolescents or with non-university students. Second, much identity research has been cross-sectional and thus cannot contribute to developmental functions of identity. We would propose that a third challenge is that most of the studies of identity come from the United States and Europe and thereby leave out most of the world’s population. Lastly, Schwartz (2005) claims that there is a need to address the applied issues in identity research. Much identity research has focused on how identity processes and statuses relate to personality characteristics, decision-making, and other intrapsychic qualities. Although such research is of interest to researchers working within the identity community, its relevance to practical and real-world contexts is limited. As we think about the education policy and practice implications of this study for South Africa, we think inquiry and analysis need to go well beyond the intrapsychic.

Conceptual Markers The conceptual apparatus of “transnationalism” and “transnational social fields” is also deployed here as a way of understanding and describing immigrant students’ identities. In direct contrast to the assimilation hypothesis that sees migrants as casting off the old and absorbing the new, transnational researchers argue that identity must be seen as one of hybridity, where immigrants take on a multiplicity of identities that are a combination of home and host (Hall, 1996). The primary determinants of these identities and their degree of fluidity and efficacy are much debated in the transnational literature (Basch et al., 1994; Becker, 1990; Bhabha, 1990; Bondi, 1993; Glick-Schiller, Basch, & Blanc, 1992; Mitchell, 1997; Roger, 1992; Smith & Guarnizo, 1998). However, there is a general agreement that for “immigrants involved in transnational activities, success does not depend so much on abandoning their culture and language to embrace another society as on preserving their original cultural endowment, while adapting instrumentally to a second” (Portes et al., 1999, p. 129). The literature on transnationalism generally underscores the fact that large numbers of people now live in social worlds that are stretched between, or dually located in, physical places and communities in two or more nations-states (Glick-Schiller et al., 1992). Hannerz (1996), for instance, discusses people who live in diverse “habitats of meaning” that are not terri-

The Architecture of Identity    39

torially restricted (p. 22). The experiences gathered in these multiple habitats accumulate to comprise people’s cultural repertoires, which in turn influence the construction of identity or indeed multiple identities. Each habitat or locality represents a range of identity-conditioning factors. These include histories and stereotypes of local belonging and exclusion, geographies of cultural difference and class/ethnic segregation, racialized socioeconomic hierarchies, degrees and types of collective mobilization, access to and nature of resources, and perceptions and regulations surrounding rights and duties. Individual and group identities are increasingly negotiated within social worlds that indulge in what Thorne (1993) aptly terms “borderwork” and that span more than one geography. Together, these multiple contexts create what some have variously called “transnational social fields” (Glick-Schiller et al., 1992), “transnational social space” (Pries, 1999), “transnational villages” (Levitt, 2001), and a “translocality” (Appadurai, 1996). Whatever the label used, the multilocal life-world presents a wider, ever-more-complex set of conditions that affect the construction, negotiation, and reproduction of social identities. These identities play out and position individuals in the course of their everyday lives within and across each of their places of attachment or perceived belonging. In this way the concepts of transnationalism and identity are inherently and intricately intertwined as the transnational networks of exchange and participation are grounded upon some perception of common identity. McEwan (2004) argues that transnationals “weave their collective identities out of multiple affiliations and positioning and link their ‘cross-cutting belongingness’ with complex attachments and multiple allegiances to issues, peoples, places, and traditions beyond the boundaries of their resident nation-states” (p. 501). The transnationalization of identities refers to ways in which the transnational flow of images, practices, discourses, and perspectives have an effect on people’s identities in comparison with both local and global settings (Cagler, 2001). Everyday experiences are evaluated from a double consciousness lens acquired from transnational links and a transnational conception of self (Du Bois, 1903/1989). In so doing, the constitution, negotiation, and representation of immigrant student identities are deeply affected by the operative dynamics of transnationalism. Yet transnationalism does not occur in a vacuum nor without resistance of national and local actors and entities. As Zúñiga and Hamann (2009) highlight (and as we will return to), schools are typically organized by the state and premised on the promotion of national not transnational identities. Hyphenated identities and hybridities do not find easy purchase there.

40    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

Theoretical Moorings The problem of identity has been theorized through different competing paradigms. The two most relevant theoretical frameworks that have a bearing on this research study are critical race theory and figures of identification (Hall, 1996).

Critical Race Theory Critical race theory (CRT) provides a theoretical framework through which individually and institutionally motivated racist acts can be highlighted, critiqued, and corrected (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Lynn, 1999; Tate, 1993; Tyson, 2003). It distinguishes between individual racism and institutional racism. CRT is an important construct for understanding Black immigrants who have made South Africa their home. It sheds light on the fact that Black immigrants are racialized as Black in South Africa, despite their varied self-identification on the basis of nation­ ality, ethnicity, language and other cultural signifiers. So immigrant Blacks find themselves subjected to similar racial prejudices and discrimination as their indigenous black counterparts (even as native Blacks sometimes work strenuously to claim distinctiveness from the newcomers). The concern of critical race theory is to re-narrativize the globalization story in a way that places historically marginalized parts of the world at the center rather than the periphery of education and globalization debates and thus, ultimately, to bring about social change (Amnesty International, 2000). Scholars across disciplines have identified several dominant and unifying themes that describe the basic tenets of CRT (Cadwell, 1996; Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado & Stefancic, 1993; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Lynn, 1999; Tate, 1993; Tyson, 2003; Velez, Perez Huber, Benavides, de la Luz, & Solorzano, 2008; Yosso, 2006). First, race is a social construct, not a biological phenomenon. It is not rooted in biology or genetics, but is instead a product of social contexts and social organization. The construct of race involves categories that society creates, revises, and retires as needed. Second, racism is endemic to life and should not be regarded as an abnormality. Socially constructed racial categorizations appear to be fundamental organizing principles of society. Individual, cultural, and institutional expressions of racism reflect the racial stratification that is part of the fabric of society. Race and racism are part of the dominant cultural ideology that manifests itself in multiple contexts and is central to consider for understanding of individual and group experience.

The Architecture of Identity    41

Third, racism benefits those who are privileged and serves the interests of the powerful to maintain the status quo with respect to racial stratification. Fourth, CRT represents a challenge to the dominant social ideology of color-blindness and meritocracy. Race neutrality and the myth of equal opportunity ignore the reality of the deeply embed­ded racial stratification in society and the impact it has on the quality of life. These notions systematically devalue Blackness and Brownness by privileging and normalizing Whiteness. Fifth, racial identity and racial identification are influenced by the racial stratification that permeates society. The perceived salience of race, the significance of racial and ethnic group membership to the selfconcept, the degree to which racial and ethnic heritage and practices are embraced or rejected, and the affiliations and identifications that are made within and outside of one’s own racial and ethnic group are all influenced by dominant cultural narratives of superiority and the “logical” social order. Sixth, assimilation and racial integration are not always in the best interests of the subordinated group. Seventh, CRT considers the significance of within-group heterogeneity and the existence of simultaneous, multiple, and intersecting identities. This is often referred to as anti-essentialism or intersectionality. All people have overlapping identities and multiple lenses through which the world is experienced. CRT challenges the idea that any person has a unidimensional identity within a single category (e.g., race or ethnicity) or that racial groups are monolithic entities. Eighth, CRT argues for the centrality, legitimacy, and appropriateness of the lived experience of racial or ethnic minorities in any analysis of racial stratification. CRT has advocated for marginalized people to tell their often unheard and unacknowledged stories and for these perspectives to be applied to the existing dominant narratives that influence the law. The dominant mindset of society, the shared stereotypes, beliefs, and understanding can only be challenged through telling stories. As Tate (1997, p. 235) explains, “The voice of the individual can provide insight into the political, structural, and representational dimensions of the legal system, especially as they relate to the group case.” This is a core rationale for the telling of immigrant students’ accounts for much of the remainder of this volume. CRT also acts as a vehicle through which the voices of the victimized can be heard in a counter-hegemonic fashion. CRT asserts and then helps challenge the reality of the victimized’s oppression by using policy and law to share experiences with the greater public to elicit outrage and, thus, ultimately, to bring about social change (Amnesty International, 2000). CRT insists on a contex­tual analysis by placing race and racism in a cultural and historical context, as well as a contemporary sociopolitical context. Finally,

42    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

the ultimate goals of CRT are to inform social justice efforts and the elimination of racial oppression. Researchers in the field (Awokoya & Clark, 2008; Dodoo, 1997; Karl & Tyre, 1997; Ogbu, 1991; Radin, 1999; Rogers & Mosley, 2006) argue that CRT is a valuable construct for examining the influence of race and the effects of racism on the lives of people of color because it sheds light on the fact that both Blacks and Black immigrants are racialized and subordinated based on that fact. By clarifying how race intertwines with nationality, immigration status, language, ethnicity, and religion (among other markers of cultural identity), it further clarifies how the jointly subordinated (i.e., the indigenous and the immigrant) can be positioned in opposition to each other with that conflict distracting from questioning of the larger social order. Yet CRT intends not just to be descriptive, but also counter-hegemonic. So through the telling of the stories of the too-often silenced, CRT is the most relevant and best-positioned framework to inform emerging research focusing specifically on Black immigrant students.

Figures of Identification Working successfully within the CRT tradition does not require working within it exclusively. The figures of identification, as propounded by Hall (1996), comprise difference, fragmentation, hybridity, border, and Diaspora. Difference constructs the subject as living in “anxiety of contamination by its other” locating any interaction with that other as occurring in “adversarial space” (Huyssen, 1986, p. vii). As Nietzsche (cited in Grossberg, 1996) points out, this logic of difference can only give rise to a politics of resentment. The alternative is to begin to construct a theory of “Otherness” that is neither essentialist nor negative, but rather based on notions of affectivity and belonging (Gilroy, 1998, 2000). The figure of fragmentation emphasizes the multiplicity of identities and of positions within any apparent identity. It thus sees a particular lived identity as a kind of disassembled and reassembled unity. Haraway (1991, p. 174) called this “a potent subjectivity synthesized from the fusion of outsider identities.” Hall explained: Identities can, therefore, be contradictory and are always situational . . . We are all involved in a series of political games around fractured or decentered identities . . . since black signifies a range of experiences, the act of representation becomes not just about decentering the subject but actually exploring the kaleidoscopic conditions of blackness. (1992, p. 21)

The Architecture of Identity    43

The figure of hybridity is used concurrently with the other figures. Hall (1996) uses it to describe three images of border existences of subaltern identities existing between two competing identities. These are (a) images of a “third space” (Bhabha, 1994), literally an in-between place inhabited by the subaltern; (b) images of “liminality” that collapse the geography of the third space into the border itself (so subaltern lives as it were on the border); and (c) images of “border-crossing,” marking an image of “between-ness” out of which identities are produced. The Diaspora experience is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity—by a conception of “identity” that lives with and through, not despite, difference—by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those that are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference. They also reference a solidarity with an ancestral geographic space that the identity holder does not currently occupy and with those claiming affinity to that same geography.

Identity Theories and Immigrant Blackness Findings from the literature reveal that, rather than theorizing identity as oriented toward either the home culture or the host culture, many immigrant students today are articulating and performing complex multiple identifications that involve bringing together disparate cultural streams (Suárez-Orozco, 2004). Identity is no longer being theorized as solely an internal process (Erikson, 1968). Instead, it is increasingly being seen as a process that is fluid, malleable, contextually driven, strategic, and socially constructed. It arises from the interaction between internal psychological processes and external processes of categorization and evaluation imposed by others. As a result, the social context is essential in predicting what identities are constructed and asserted. The journey of many immigrant students represents a process of racial and ethnic self-discovery and self-authoring. New identities are crafted in the process of immigrant uprooting and resettlement through continuous feedback between the subjective sense of self and what is mirrored by the social milieu (Erikson, 1968; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001; SuárezOrozco, 2004). Immigrant students see and compare themselves in relation to those around them, based on their social similarity or dissimilarity with the reference groups that most directly affect their experiences, especially with regard to such socially visible and categorized markers as gender, phenotype, accent, language, name, and nationality (Berry, 1997; Murrell, 1999; Nesdale et al., 1997; Suárez-Orozco, 2004; Suárez-Orozco, 2000; Wu,

44    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

2002). In reacting to their contexts of reception and learning how they are viewed and treated within them, immigrant students form and inform their own identities and their attitudes toward the society that receives them. It is within these discontinuous social, symbolic, and political spaces that manifestations of identity crystallize and develop. Such transnational settings and dynamics profoundly affect the construction, negotiation, and reproduction of immigrant identities. This chapter focused on the review of the literature on empirical studies that related to this study. A core interest in the review of this literature was to establish what is already known in the field that our study fits within. The review was primarily undertaken to identify the debates in the field with particular interest in existing gaps and silences in the field that gave credence to this study. In Chapter 3 we present findings in the form of emergent themes that were identified through data analysis.

3 So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?

Identities are the names we give the different ways that we are positioned by, and position ourselves within the narratives of the past. —Hall, 1993, p. 225

Introduction The construction of a new identity is a vital process for immigrants given that establishing themselves in a new country and starting a different life always implies a redefinition of their place in the host society and of their position with respect to other social groups. A consequence of these changes is that immigrants’ sense of self takes new directions in relation to the circumstances in which they find themselves and the new roles that they need to adopt. The defining characteristics chosen by individuals to distinguish themselves from others and to ascribe membership into groups vary a great deal according to social and personal circumstances (Horowitz, 1975) but are also crucially limited by the repertoire of identities (Kroskrity, 2001) available in the society in which they live. Central to a definition of Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities, pages 45–86 Copyright © 2015 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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46    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

membership for oneself and others for an immigrant is ethnic and racial affiliation within the specific categories that are used and enforced for social classification in that society. The postmodern turn has seen a shift in emphasis from a singular identity to a multiplicity of identities and to the connections or articulations between these multiplicities, to what Mercer (1992, pp. 425–426) calls “the mantra of race, class and gender.” Identities are always situational, relational, incomplete, and in a process (Hall, 2000). Many researchers have now shifted their focus to investigating ways in which fragmented and “polyphonous” (Barrett, 1999) identities coexist within the same individual, ways in which identities change and evolve according to situations and contexts, ways in which identities are created, imposed, enjoined, or repressed through social institutions and interactions (De Fina, 2003). In addition, the concept of identity as a social construction implies that it is an interaction between an internal psychological process and external process of categorization and evaluation imposed by others (Helms, 1990). The single greatest developmental task of adolescence is to forge a coherent sense of identity. Erikson (1968) claimed that in order for this happen, there needed to be a certain amount of complementarity between the individual’s sense of self and the diverse social milieus he had to traverse. However, in an increasingly fractured, heterogeneous transnational world, there is much less complementarity between social spaces. How then do immigrant children forge their identities in traversing increasingly discontinuous social, symbolic, and political spheres? How do these youths construct identities that will, if successful, enable them to thrive in incommensurable social settings such as home, school, and the world of peers?

The Constitution, Representation, and Negotiation of Identities This chapter presents findings from our voluminous data capture. De Fina (2003) proposed a useful framework to understand how identities are constituted, represented, and negotiated. She distinguished between identity as narrative, identity as social orientation, identity as agency, identity as social representation, and identity as categorization. Utilizing this framework, the data from this research study were analyzed on two levels. The first level of analysis focused on the analysis of two basic aspects of the construction and expression of identity, namely the projection of the self into specific social roles and the expression of membership into groups and communities. The first aspect, the projection of self into social roles, was analyzed through the consideration of ways of presenting the self in relation to others and of ways of presenting

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    47

the self in relation to social experiences. We looked at the role of the self as narrative, the self with respect to others as expressed in social orientation, while we analyzed the role of the self with respect to social experiences as agency. The second level of analysis of identity dealt more with the explicit construction of self in relation to the immigrant student’s community or to external groups. Basic to membership construction is a self-and-other categorization, which is studied through identification strategies such as identity as social representation and identity as categorization. When self- and-other categorizations are at stake, identity is more often negotiated than displayed, and in order to analyze it we need to resort to implicit and explicit reference to belief systems and ideologies. The nexus is between the local expressions of identity by particular subjects and the more global processes of collective representation that frame and interact with such local expressions.

The Projection of Self into Social Roles and Expression of Membership into Groups Identity as Narrative This view of identity presents the self as essentially a fictitious creation through which we understand our lives as coherent stories (“narrative identity”). We are the stories we inhabit and tell about ourselves (Ricoeur, 1991). Fiction here does not mean deliberate falsehood, but rather emphasizes the inevitable gap between accounts of reality and personhoods and what supposedly “really is.” According to this approach, the self is not a static and fixed entity, but a social construction that emerges mainly in narrative form (Bruner, 1991). As Kerby (1991) has argued, “Narratives are a primary embodiment of our understanding of the world of experience, and ultimately of ourselves” (p. 64). Thus narrative becomes central in the encoding of human experience because it is based on temporal organization, which in turn produces coherent self-understanding (Polkinghorne, 1991). The narrativization process is basic to the constitution of the self in that it allows humans to make sense of experience and to grasp the self as a whole. Furthermore, narrative identity endorses the postmodernist conception of the self as “a reflexive construction” (Brockmeier, 2000, p. 53) and as a process in flux. According to this approach, stories reflect an inner reality but also shape it. Therefore identity cannot be seen as a product of some fixed and static social reality but should instead be seen as an ever-changing process. Immigrant identity manifested itself within the context of identity as narrative in this research study in four predominant ways: namely, (a) personality/character traits and interests, (b) dominating identities, (c) ethnic identities, and (d) hyphenated identities.

48    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

Personality/Character Traits and Interests A startling finding of this study is that the constitution of the immigrant psyche is such that the students did not readily classify themselves according to physical appearance or some skin pigmentocracy. Nor did they readily identify themselves in terms of race, ethnicity, or culture. Rather, it is only after repetitive probing that immigrant children would then identify in terms of their country of origin. Furthermore, almost all the Black (African) immigrant students did not immediately identify themselves in terms of ethnicity. They initially described themselves according to personality/character traits and interests:

I am very quiet and soft, light-hearted and bubbly and very artistic. (Chanda, Zambia)



I’m a person who is amiable. I’m kind. I like doing things for fun. I’m great at acting. (Kevin, Zimbabwe)



I’m a sports person a soccer player. I don’t like fighting. I’m kind of talkative. (Bryan, Cameroon)



I will say that I’m a creative person and I adapt myself according to the situation that I’m living in. I do not complain that much. I’m a peaceful person. My life’s passion is in music. It’s like I love music. (Amani, DRC)



I’m a fun, outgoing person. I’m more understanding. I prefer to listen to people’s problems than to talk about mine. I’m very helpful in all areas of understanding. I love being around people. (Paul, Malawi)



I’m very hard-working. I want to get to somewhere in life. I know how to play, but I also know when there has to be like certain boundaries that I don’t cross. (Unapa, Zimbabwe)

Each of these assertions of self include identity affiliations—a quiet type, fun-loving, a soccer player, one oriented towards others, a hard worker— but none of these are geographically associated, let alone ethnic or racial. In contrast, all the Black (Indian) immigrant children had, with a sense of immediacy, churned out succinct, almost mechanical or programmed responses by way of linguistic, ethnic, and racial identities. They responded with no mention of character/personal traits or interests:

I am a Hindi-speaking Indian. (Rahul, India)



I am an Indian Tamil speaking Hindu from Sri Lanka. (Priyanka, Sri Lanka)



I am an Indian Muslim and I speak Urdu. (Amjad, Pakistan)

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    49



I am an Indian from Gujarat, India and I speak Hindi. (Yash, India)



I’m a Muslim from Pakistan. (Moosa, Pakistan)

Perhaps this nation-of-origin affiliation was the result of being subjected to the caste system in India, as Balagopalan (2009) suggests. Maybe it had something to do with being asked about geographic or linguistic origins more than African immigrant children were. More important for our purpose is that the juxtaposition of answers highlights how very differently individuals from different groups turn to their repertoire of available identity assertions to project senses of self. Dominating Identities Although the self is comprised of multiple, shifting, and simultaneous identities, a dominating identity represents a facet of the self that is most influential in self-definition (Murrell, 1999). This identity can overshadow others and is influenced by status of the identity, by reference group affiliations, and identity development. What this study found is that most immigrant students identified strongly in terms of their birthplace, but not necessarily as their first point of reference. They claimed strong ties with national roots. Their status frame of reference was their country of origin, irrespective of whether they had lived for a longer period in South Africa (when we interviewed them) than in their country of origin. There seemed to be an “overarching identity” and a nostalgic link to their country of origin that informed their daily existence in the host country.

I am a girl from Zambia, just a normal girl, very confident. I’m not shy; I’m proud to be a Zambian and to follow the Zambian culture. (Chanda, Zambia)



I would like to be known as a Nigerian, because that’s what I am and because I think Nigerians are harder working and study well. They also have respect and listen to elders. (Brenda, Nigeria)



I am proud to be an Indian from Sri Lanka with strong values and morality. (Priyanka, Sri Lanka)



I am Angolan. I like the Angolan culture and traditions. (Neil, Angola)



I am Ghanaian. . . . My culture is different from theirs [South African]. My culture teaches me to respect myself, how to talk, how to be decent in public. Here I don’t understand them; they don’t understand me. (Andrew, Ghana)



I’m Burundian. (Melody, Burundi)

50    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities



I am a Muslim from India. My religion teaches me to respect elders. (Anash, India)



I am a Congolese girl who speaks French. (Jeannette, DRC)



I’m a young Zimbabwean girl. . . . I’m proudly Zimbabwean. (Vena, Zimbabwe)



I prefer to be identified as Zambian, because I’m proud of where I come from and wouldn’t want to change it. Most of my family tree is in Zambia. I would love to keep it that way. I’d say I am a Zambian student in South Africa who has great potential and I am very proud of my country, Zambia. (Chanda, Zambia)

Ethnic Identity At its core, ethnic identity is a sense of belonging to one’s ethnic group. From a developmental perspective, ethnic identity is assumed to exist in childhood in only rudimentary form, as a self-label together with basic information about ethnicity and attitudes about one’s group derived largely from one’s parents (Bernal, Knight, Garza, & Cota, 1993). A fuller ethnic identity develops during adolescence and early adulthood—that is, the age of our participants—through a process of exploring one’s ethnicity and attaining a clear understanding of the meaning of one’s group membership for oneself (Phinney, 1993). More than any other social institution, the family provides the basic foundation for ethnic identity development, but ethnic identity evolves and changes throughout life in relation to school, community, and work contexts, as well as broader contextual factors such as the geographic density status and history of one’s ethnic group (Rumbaut, 1994). The most common identifications found in these narratives were ethnic characterizations linked strongly to culture, traditions, and language. The saliency of ethnicity as a category for identification cannot be understood without referring to some of the wider conditions of production of the narratives, especially to the institutional practices of ethnic categorization that are currently taking place in South African society, and to some aspects of the daily life experiences of immigrants. Ethnic identity is a very complex category. Ethnicity appears to be a dynamic social construct that may be based on a host of different criteria. However, institutional definitions of ethnicity should be clearly distinguished from group members’ ascriptions and perceptions, since they are based on criteria that are, in most cases, determined by political convenience. When building identities, immigrants come to terms with these in situ definitions and develop elements of acceptance and/or resistance towards them.

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    51 I am a Tamil-speaking Hindu from Sri Lanka who lives by strict Tamil values and culture. My father is a priest at the Temple. We are vegetarians and we speak Tamil at home. I want to be known as a Tamilian who comes from Sri Lanka because the Tamils in South Africa are different. . . . They do not know or follow the Tamil culture correctly. . . . They don’t speak Tamil [language]; they are like South Africans and not like the true Tamilians from India or Sri Lanka. No matter how long I stay in South Africa, I will always be a Sri Lankan. (Priyanka, Sri Lanka) I am mixed. My mother is Hutu and my father is Tutsi. My parents tell me not to say which one I am. Just to say I am Gharandis, a Rwandan, Gharandis girl. (Belise, Rwanda) I am a Hutu from Rwanda. (Alice, Rwanda) I’m a Congolese from Lubi culture and I speak Iswahili. My cultural group speaks Kiluba. We always eat pap and fish. Ladies wear long dresses; if they don’t, you have a problem with the chiefs. In my culture, women don’t speak too much like the men. (Gail, DRC)

Students’ considerations of identity can have an interesting and reinforcing or complicating echo from their parents, as the following account from an immigrant mother describing a kind of post-ethnic identity for her children illuminates. (Her mixing of singular and plural references is original to the recording.) I prefer to identify them as a girl with good morality, not identify them as a Congolese or as a Belgium or anything but with a good morality, where in every society they can be accepted. I really don’t think that they must be like South African; they must have those general values for all morality. If they can keep the good value from what they learnt at school, if even in those cultures there’s something good, if they can pick up all the good and make them themselves with the identity of a Congolese, it’s going to be very great. But I don’t like them to be identified like a South African because you don’t know what that means to be really South African; you don’t know what it means behind that. Oh, my big fear is that my children take on more from the bad side of South African culture. (Mrs. Onamaka, DRC)

Hyphenated Identity Hyphenated identity is a term that implies an ethnocultural dual identity and evokes questions and debates regarding which side of the hyphen the person belongs to. As much as the hyphen separates, it also creates possible senses of belonging. Such questions often loom large in the minds of immigrants, those who leave one country for another, one culture for the other. The hyphen makes them liable to be seen as oscillating between their two cultures and feeling a conflict or a tension arising between cultures.

52    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

Sometimes immigrants manage to assimilate at the expense of their original and ancestral culture or, at the other end of the spectrum, they fail to blend in with their new environment. In other cases, similar to Gibson’s (1988) study Accommodation Without Assimilation of Sikh newcomers in California, they try hard to maintain equilibrium between the two, which is not an easy thing to do. To use racially hyphenated identities is to acknowledge the social construction of race and how it continues to discriminately affect the lives of immigrants. The dual identity is no myth, and the hyphen gives voice to this painful reality. At times these identities are also perforated as it is scrutinized, stretched, challenged, and threatened by larger social and political formations, as evident from the following response (Sirin & Fine, 2008). I was born in Zimbabwe, but when I came to South Africa, it was hard because I did not know the language [Sotho], but then I got to know it. Now I know that I’m getting to be a South African. I would tell you that I’m from Zimbabwe, but that now I am a South African. Sometimes I feel like I’m abandoning my country, but still I can say I’m a Zimbabwean . . . but for now when I am in Zimbabwe, I am a Zimbabwean, but I am also trying to be a South African. . . . It’s better in South Africa. (Kevin, Zimbabwe)

Kevin seems to be straddling across the boundaries of two countries and is torn as he struggles with issues of patriotism and loyalty to his country of origin, as the wistful but perhaps accurate “It’s better in South Africa” suggests. From other parts of his interview, Kevin’s worry about being disloyal surfaces. For example, he explains, “I feel like I am abandoning Zimbabwe.” He refers nostalgically to stories that he has heard from his parents about the glorious days in Zimbabwe and states that if the country reverts to times like those he will return there. “Yeah, if the education is better, if the country is like the old country which it was . . . before I was even born, if it goes back to that point, I will return to Zimbabwe.” Presumably he is referring to the time after Zimbabwe overthrew its own apartheid yoke (when the minority-White government of Rhodesia was replaced) but before Zimbabwe’s plague of corruption and mismanagement diminished its revolution. His account reminds us that the circumstances in the country of origin figure in how students make sense of the hyphen. Issues of “transnationalism” and transnational social fields are evident in other responses, which seem nostalgic, but less concerned with disloyalty: I am a Sri Lankan South African. I came to South Africa when I was five. We are now living in South Africa for nine years. Yes, I think it’s safe to say I am a Sri Lankan-South African because I don’t really remember much of Sri

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    53 Lanka, although my parents tell me a lot about my country . . . how people live, the things they do, how to behave and all that. (Hamsa, Sri Lanka)

The above response is from the younger sister of the other Sri Lankan immigrant student—whom we call Priyanka and quoted earlier—who firmly claimed that she was Sri Lankan. Interestingly, both siblings were exposed to similar influences at home and at school but one opted for a hyphenated identity and the other preferred to be identified in terms of her country of origin. Perhaps, as Hamann and Zúñiga (2011b) found with students in Mexico who previously had lived in the United States, age at time of departure factors in how immigrant students affiliate. The following two responses also illustrate how current circumstances and time since leaving one’s native country can influence how immigrant students negotiate the balance and contours of the hyphen as they navigate their way through the social contexts of their new country. I am Rwandan, but I am living now for 12 years in South Africa. So I’d say I am Rwandan but also becoming South African. I am a Rwandan-South African. (Aline, Rwanda) [Sighing] I don’t . . . I wouldn’t say I’m a foreigner, no. I am a Congolese-South African, yes. I’m [pause], who I am is two different cultures that play a huge, huge, impact on me and sadly I’m going to say it’s more South African than Congolese people that have made me who I am. But because culture means a lot to me, I have to say I am Congolese-South African. (Vanessa, DRC)

Things Falling Apart: The Moral Degeneration of South African Society A central thread running through “identity as narrative” in almost all responses of immigrant students was that of the moral degeneration of indigenous Black students. Local Black students were described as lacking a sound value system as evidenced from their alleged immoral and unethical conduct. The observations, comments, and perceptions of these immigrant students have a deeply uncomfortable echo with the accusations directed at previous generations of Blacks in pre-democracy South Africa. As such, they strike at the very chords of the moral fiber of South African society and raise the prospect that there is something seriously amiss in our society. Immigrant students struggled to come to terms with conflicting values. Values that were ingrained in their respective homes and communities were suddenly being challenged on the classroom floor and school grounds. According to the previously quoted Congolese immigrant mother:

54    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities South Africans, [pause] our values and their values, they’re completely different and to us they [my children] come back home, and we try to do our best to put our values in them. It’s not easy for them when they get to school, they are the minority, to keep strong with the culture in that diversity of cultures, diversity of mentality, that’s what is a big challenge for my kids. (Mrs. Onamaka, Congo)

Yet almost all interviewed immigrant students remained committed to their value systems and, surprisingly, through a sense of agency and determination, began to think of ways to assist in restoring the moral backbone of the host country. I love my culture because they have moral roles. Like kids here, some of them they go over, they do all these things kids their age are not supposed to do. But because of where I come from and my culture, I know my rights; I have respect. I know I am not supposed to do this until I’m of a certain age. So I’m really proud where I come from because they taught me what to do and what not to and I listen. (Unapa, Zimbabwe) I see a kind of deficiency in the attitude of South African learners. But for me at least, it’s something that I can use to build the school into a better school and make the learners see that, “what you’re doing is wrong.” My character and qualities is for constructing and not for destroying. (Chanda, Zambia) I will change them (i.e., South Africans). I want them to understand what education is really about and how elders must be treated. They must really get to understand that. (Kevin, Congo)

Immigrant parents, on the other hand, were less optimistic about their children’s prospects to be peer educators of improved morality and lamented the possibility of the South African social context negatively influencing their children to take on the bad side of the host country: The South African culture is completely different to ours. Our children have many challenges because there are many things in the South African culture that we disagree with. The first challenge they have is just to mix with others but they must not forget to keep the value of their culture. I’ve noticed there is a kind of respect that our children have towards parents that most South African children lack. (Mr. Kola, Nigeria) Another thing is in our country, in our culture, there is something really different. . . . This after school sleepover story, in our culture we don’t agree. So it wasn’t easy for me, they’ve got friends who like to come and sleep over at our house, I can’t tell them not to come, I will agree, they can come, but when it’s now my kids’ turn, I refuse. (Mr. Lutumba, Zambia)

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    55 It seems like there are many things in this country, which is normal, but for us it’s abnormal. There’s this thing of boyfriend . . . it’s that mentality of saying that as a woman I don’t need men, I just need to have a child and you know, they’ve got that a lot, and for us that is not acceptable. I’d like my child to go further in education and one day, if she gets married, to be a valued mother and wife and if she doesn’t get married, to be a valued woman. Not having a child [outside of marriage] and thinking this is a normal life. In our culture, a boyfriend is someone you can have at a certain age and he must be someone that the relationship can lead to a marriage. The bad side of South African culture is the dressing, the disrespect, drinking, smoking, drugs, and this whole issue of boyfriends. (Mrs. Ogina, Nigeria)

Newcomers were not the only ones to bemoan the apparent immorality of the new South Africa. Allegations of the degeneration of the moral fiber of South African society took varied forms. This was succinctly summed up by a South African teacher who was close to retirement when we interviewed him. The indigenous South African children are very lazy. They just don’t care. I don’t see parents actually encouraging their children to study or to respect their teachers. I’d like to teach in some private institution where my only concern will be to teach the learner and not end up being in some sort of argument with a learner who disrespects you. In Black schools, we have a problem with learners who don’t respect you. I mean, it’s not worth it. Learners come to school drunk; they smell of dagga. We have things like violence in schools. Things like teenage pregnancies, children dropping out of schools as early as grade ten, abortions, and things like that. I think this is the issue of immorality. You know, no more values whatsoever. (Mr. Temba)

The disrespectfulness and ill-discipline of local Black students was a crucial challenge to the formation of identity as narrative in immigrant students, as it seemed to complicate the ideas about academic norms and school values that they had brought from their country of origin. The norms and values of the South African schooling context appeared to be different and degenerate. Many immigrant students expressed repugnance at the manner in which local Black (African) students expressed disrespect to elders: If a teacher says be quiet and you don’t, that really gets on my nerves because it shows disrespect, that you’re being disrespectful to the teacher. Respect is the number one thing that you need to earn from a learner. (Belece, Rwanda) There is more discipline back home [in Cameroon], it’s more difficult to misbehave. Here sometimes the learners will talk back to the teacher. . . . They don’t respect their teachers. (Mbeng, Cameroon)

56    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities There are certain things that make me feel pity for teachers. They really suffer. Students are very rude. They don’t listen. They laugh and mock at teachers. The Black South Africans insult teachers in class . . . It’s the background; charity begins at home. You can see that a particular student is disrespectful to his parents because he speaks to teachers the way he wants to. This pains me a lot. (Jedidah, Zambia) The classes are quieter in Zimbabwe. Here most of the children make a noise; they play, gamble, swear, and get into fights all the time. They have no respect for their teachers. They are ill mannered and have no discipline at all. (Brenda, Nigeria)

Teachers and principals in this study emphasized the marked difference in behavior between local Black students and immigrant students. They also voiced their concerns in this regard, as they could envision difficult implications that this held for South African society. Mr. Ismail, a Black (Indian) principal at Median High was of the opinion: Immigrant students have stronger moral values than our local students. Immigrants tend to be more conservative, willing to help, and obedient. They are more respectful, committed, and abide by school rules. I think it has to do with the individual’s background and home upbringing. Our South African children like to test the boundaries; they spend more time doing this than actually concentrating on their studies.

Mr. Mazibuko, a Black (African) teacher at the same school, claimed that the behavior of local Black learners seemed to be influenced by what he termed an attitude of “entitlement”: Immigrant students are respectful and disciplined. The most troublesome are the local students. It has to do with this “It’s our country” attitude that they have. The local learners have a great sense of entitlement and at some stage abuse it. In many ways you will find a learner’s conduct is unnecessary and they go out of their way to indicate their presence. They end up in fights with other local students.

At Paucity High, Mrs. Kambule a Black (African) teacher attributed the attitude of local Black learners to the whole issue of children’s rights. She claimed that South African children know that they are protected by their rights but do not understand that those rights come with a duties and obligations: I’ve realized that immigrant students are more respectful than the South Africans. I think it is how they were brought up. They recognize an elder person and they know that they have an obligation of respecting elders.

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    57 They don’t backchat. They are humble. They are not violent. If they have a problem . . . or if they don’t agree with the teacher in the class they don’t just shout and say “I cannot do it” or something like that. The South African learners on the other hand talk back to you in a rude manner in class. It’s because the learners know that they have so-called rights. They are protected by their right to no corporal punishment. They tend to be confrontational.

For Ms. Pretorius, a White teacher at Opulence High, the discrepancy between these two sets of students pivoted on an understanding of the workings of hierarchy: I have never, never had a [Black] immigrant learner be rude or backchat. I find that they’re very respectful, very in their place. They kind of understand how the hierarchy works in the traditional Western society . . . that somehow our local Blacks just don’t get. Immigrant students are very respectful, exceptionally well mannered, very well spoken and very aware of their personal look, their hygiene, the way they walk and the way they talk. They are very well groomed.

That this teacher’s nostalgia for a “traditional Western society” rearticulates the social logic that justified “civilizing” Whites critiquing native Africans for not knowing their place is a thread that will be returned to. Mrs. Omidire, an immigrant teacher at Paucity High, offered the following rationale for the misbehavior of local Black learners: South African learners are disrespectful in ways of just normal ethics and values. Greeting in the morning when you see the teacher, stand up when the teacher comes to class. Those things are not there. Also they talk back to the teacher. Those little, little things, the morale is very low. I think most Black South Africans come from single parents . . . you know no proper care. They have this extended family, even if their parents are not there. Yes, something is different, completely different from other parts of Africa. So, I would buttress my point that the family structure needs to be reinstated for social responsibility to be inculcated into South African children. Immigrant learners do not do these disrespectful things. They are more cultured and more socially responsible.

As a consequence, the perceived lack of discipline negatively impacted on the education of these students. Teachers spent most of their teaching time informing students about good behavior, ethics, sound moral values, and discipline. You know almost half of the period is used just to educate them about their behavior. Instead of teaching them the lesson you have prepared, because

58    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities of their attitude, you have to divert now to teaching them morals and discipline, and so it’s always difficult for us. (Ms. Mohale, indigenous teacher, self-identified as Black, Sepedi-speaking female, Paucity High)

Whether this was actually teaching good behavior (with students absorbing new more gracious and respectful forms of interaction) or instead something more nefarious exceeds this research design. However, wellknown research on academic tracking in high schools in the United States by Jeannie Oakes (1985) has long recognized the link, first, between time spent on disciplining and lack of time on academic instruction and, second and related, how framing students as unruly and needing to be disciplined becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy with reduced academic success a predictable result. An experienced local Black (African) teacher of many years pleaded for the reinstatement of disciplinary measures such as corporal punishment in schools to mend the moral fabric of South African society: It’s just simple; it’s easy. Let’s put discipline back in schools. Discipline teaches morals. It teaches values. Then, we’ll be able to appreciate one another. (Mr. Mazibuku, teacher)

Another was willing to paint the behavior of a whole group based on the thievery of (presumably) just a few: Stealing cell phones seems to be rife at this school. Immigrant students have not been involved in stealing other peoples’ things. They are not so bold. (Ms. Mohale, teacher)

From these teacher accounts, it would seem that all the ills of society had descended on the school and created a festering wound. This diagnosis was echoed by some of the immigrant students. Andrew, a Malawian, narrates an incident of verbal abuse. Things sounded very strange to Andrew on his first day at school. Andrew termed this a “vacuum” or “space”: It’s what they do. I didn’t know that until when I came here. . . . “F you,” that strange language, I heard many children saying this on my very first day at this school. I asked a friend that I had just met, what does it mean? [What impact did it have on you once you understood what it meant?] It’s not language I would like to use on anybody.

Theft was another vice that seemed to beset the school:

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    59 Some people in this school like to fight. There are others that steal people’s things. This does not happen in India. . . . We respect other peoples’ belongings and we do not like to fight. (Jeet, India)

Other overt forms of alleged immorality were manifested in the dress code, smoking, gambling, fighting, and purported dating patterns of local Black students: In my culture we are not allowed to wear trousers or to have a boyfriend when you’re still at school. You can have a boyfriend when you’re matured enough, like 20 or 21. But here it’s different because they [South Africans] wear clothes that really make them look like “loose,” like they have no morals, and do totally different things . . . like drinking and smoking, drugs. (Vanessa, DRC) If my clothes or dressing is not appropriate, my parents would tell me that it’s not appropriate. In Zimbabwe your dressing depends on what you’re doing and where you are. We have to wear, like, appropriate clothing. We don’t wear clothes that some people wear, like trousers, when you go to visit your relatives or your grandparents. We are not allowed to dress that way because it wouldn’t look like you’re respecting them. Also, we can’t wear open clothes . . . that shows your body, but here some of them because sometimes you look at someone and you’re like this person isn’t wearing something nice, appropriate for walking around. (Alice, Zimbabwe) I am different from other girls in South Africa maybe by what I wear. In our culture, we don’t wear like trousers or whatever. I always wear skirts and traditional clothes. (Angela, Ghana)

Immigrant teens also claimed that dating at a young age seemed to be the “cool” thing for local Black students, despite the serious threat of HIV/AIDS. Like me, I don’t date, not at all . . . so a friend of mine can just tell me. Oh no, dating is fun and you must go. But I know it is wrong at this age. (Annika, Angola)

Local teen girls’ relationships have also led to an increase in teenage pregnancies (Panday, Makiwane, Ranchod, & Letsoalo, 2009) and consequently to an increase in abortions. (South Africa’s Health Minister acknowledges two difficult statistics—the high rates of HIV/AIDS and of abortions by teens—but blames teen girls’ relationships with older men, relationships that are not those complained about by immigrant peers [Mashaba, 2013].) While Andrew “passes” as one of the local Blacks because of his phenotypic features, he is adamant that he is different from them in terms of his behavior.

60    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities At home, we are not allowed to smoke. Here they smoke. At home, no gambling. I feel like different because of the way they [South Africans] behave. (Andrew, Ghana)

Fighting seemed to be commonplace among local Black students. Much of their energies were invested in petty issues and in provoking and testing the mettle of each other, rather than concentrating on their studies. Immigrant children are quiet. They don’t cause any trouble. They are so different, very strict sort of upbringing, so they just tow the line. The local Black students? Oh, that’s another cup of tea. . . . They are constantly in fights. They should learn how to behave from immigrant students. (Mrs. Lopes, principal, Opulence High)

Immigrant students desperately tried to make sense of unfamiliar experiences in their new host country and to grasp the self as a whole as they constructed and expressed their identity through the narrativization process. It would seem as if they were walking a tightrope with push and pull forces constantly disrupting their sense of balance. In a perhaps unwitting repeat of apartheid-era storylines, their indigenous peers were described as problematic and they were portrayed as better behaved and more studious, an assumption that, per the all-to-common power of self-fulfilling-storylines, seemed to be echoed by their direct experiences. Meanwhile, the tension between immigrant and native-born peers was sufficiently tangible that it deflected critique of the perpetuation of South Africa’s still deeply stratified and hierarchical education system (Carter, 2012; Soudien, 2012)

Identity as Social Orientation In analyzing identity as social orientation, the focus shifts to ways in which narrators present or orient themselves in relation to others. Identity is defined in terms of members’ orientation to the context at hand and as a process activated in relation to different contexts of interaction. Furthermore, identity is analyzed as implicitly conveyed (usually), not as openly discussed and negotiated, although the quotes shared in the last section point out that everyday communication sometimes does include overt assertions of identity. Our focus is on how immigrant students see or identify themselves in the host country. Vena, a learner at Opulent High, saw herself first and foremost as a person and as an African from Zimbabwe. She disliked the fact that she was expected to classify herself according to a particular category in South

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    61

Africa. However, South African societal norms and practices forced her to adapt her thinking so that the abnormal took on a feigned sense of normalcy within the context in which she found herself. I feel that, as a person, I’m supposed to hang out with the Black people. It’s just, I don’t know how it happens, but it’s very weird. I feel like I have to be with the Black people as a “black” person. I’ve heard people saying that as well because, like, you just see all the Black people are friends with Black people. White people are friends with White people. So I think if I have to go to White people and tell them “guys I want to spend break with you” it will obviously be weird. Yeah, maybe it’s normal in South Africa, but I don’t like that. I feel that if I want to hang out with the White people then I should do that. I should go to them, and they shouldn’t feel weird about it; like none of us should feel weird. We should really feel like it must be like a normal thing. I don’t really know if it’s expected, but it’s just one of those natural things, like an unwritten rule of the school. I get to school and I think I’m probably going to end up with the Black people kind of thing.

Unapa, a learner at Opulent High, found the formation of her identity being activated in relation to different contexts of interaction at school. To facilitate better orientation within the social context of the school, she had to learn two additional languages: I speak Shona and English. As a Zimbabwean living in South Africa, I have to speak Zulu and a bit of Afrikaans as well. I actually started learning Zulu in grade 8. I had a choice between Zulu and French. I wanted to do French, but the school told me that all the Black learners must do Zulu.

Surely since the advent of democracy there was no official policy that required Black African learners to learn one language instead of another, but just as surely, Unapa shares a clear sense of what was communicated to her unofficially but pointedly. And that message not only steered her to a particular course of language study, but it reminded her of the social taxonomy within which she was viewed. School shaped how she was supposed to imagine herself. Orientation to the context at hand witnessed Vanessa, an immigrant student from the DRC and a learner at Opulent High, defining her identity in multiple ways. While she was forced to make a mental shift with regard to the role of women in society, she was also given the opportunity to shape her identity in terms of gender equity and empowerment. The first thing that was absolutely new for me was having women teachers, because in Congo the women basically stay at home. Here it seemed normal . . . here there was a woman teaching us and it was something that I

62    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities wasn’t used to. . . . She was White, and all of them [teachers] were White. So I was like, “okay.” I had the mindset of “What can she tell me? [And] they must bring more men teachers.” So that was something I had to get over very quickly. Here the women are very into society; like they are a part of society because unlike there [Congo] they take the back seat while the men are the leaders. I came to realize that, as a woman, I can also be a leader and I like that, that is who I want to be.

Intriguingly, even though Vanessa’s example comes from half-way around the world in comparison to Wortham’s (2002) study of gender and school opportunity in the “new Latino diaspora,” like for Wortham’s research subjects, for Vanessa the relocation to a wealthier, more Westernized society meant increased opportunities for young women. Andrew was resolute in his thinking and preferred to present himself in relation to others in terms of a continental perspective. Since the context within which he now found himself forced him to be classified according to color, he vehemently denied being “Black”; instead he argued: I do not classify myself as “Black” according to South African racial categories. I am “coffee brown.” I am an African since like them [South Africans] I too am from the continent of Africa. How can they [South Africans] call me a makwerekwere? (Andrew, Ghana)

Some of the Black immigrant students, both Indians and Africans alike, in an attempt to evade South Africa’s version of the “perpetual foreigner syndrome” (Wu, 2002, p. 79), sought to render invisible the visible differences between themselves and the desired or chosen reference group. This was what is termed “psychosocial passing” (Robinson, 1999). They consciously and subliminally sought to avoid having their differences noticed by behaving in ways that were consistent with the chosen reference group. Their ease of assimilation into the chosen reference group was to some degree sanctioned by their phenotypic racial features. The concept of “passing” within the Black community in the West has traditionally referred to American Blacks who passed as White because of their light skin color. However, in the South African context, this concept refers to Black immigrant students who pass for local Black students because of similar racialized features. I can honestly say, I have not once noticed that the girls treat them any differently to a South African Zulu girl or a South African Xhosa girl or a South African Sotho girl, they look the same. It is really difficult to tell them apart physically. (Mrs. Wilson, a White Grade 10 teacher, Opulence High)

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    63 They don’t really react badly, because they say I look mostly like a South African, like a Venda. I don’t look like a foreigner. I mean I look like a Venda. So, when I tell them I am from another country, they actually get surprised. (Effi, Zambia) I fit in well, like the other South African Indians in this school. I speak English well, I don’t really have an “Indian” accent. So I am like one of them. (Jeet, India) I would never discuss my culture. I don’t want people to know more about me . . . if they don’t know, they will see me like one of them. (Paul, Ghana) Well they didn’t really see me as an immigrant; I was just like one of them. So I just let them go on believing that I am one of them. I don’t let them know that I am really an immigrant. (Vena, Zimbabwe) I don’t say I am from Zimbabwe. I try to hide it, just to fit in so that they don’t treat me differently. It would, like, change the way they treat me like before they knew I was Zimbabwean. If you are Zimbabwean, sometimes you won’t have friends or some, they just ignore you. (Teresa, Zimbabwe)

The ability to join the mainstream unnoticed is more challenging when one is racially marked as different. However, in the polyphenotypic South African context, the most discernible marker among Black immigrant students was not one of race, but that of language and accent. In the case of Black (African) immigrant students, it was their lack of proficiency in indigenous languages that often signaled their “foreignness,” whereas with Black (Indian) immigrant students, it was their lack of proficiency in English that made them conspicuous as foreigners. In both cases, accent in the use of the English language was the critical signifier for being the Other. A secondary instantaneous indicator was that of “shades of blackness.” Indigenous Black students could sometimes recognize Black (African) immigrant students by the “blackness” of their skin pigmentation. Wu (2002) argues that immigrants’ ability to “pass” or be fully assimilated unnoticed is no longer possible for most new arrivals in this era of globalization, although this scholarly observation does not undermine the evidence that some of the immigrant students we studied were still, nonetheless, attempting just such passing. Kevin, who could physically identify with the local Black students because of a similar “shade of blackness,” tried to desperately pass as one of them by addressing his shortcoming in terms of learning an indigenous language. He claimed, I do not want to be identified by my culture. I look like South African Black people. I have made an effort to learn Sepedi to try to fit in and to communicate with the local Blacks, so that they do not say I am a makwerekwere.

64    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

Immigrant students chose varied ways to present and orient themselves in relation to others in the host country. What is important to note is that although the phenotypic features of many immigrant students allowed them to pass for one of the local Blacks, all immigrant students were resolute in maintaining their sense of moral uprightness. They claimed that because of their vulnerable status in the host country, it was in their interest to pass as local Blacks, but they wanted to do this in terms of appearance only. Wanting to avoid conflict or subordination could coexist with maintaining a personal sense of both difference and righteousness. Concurring with messages heard from teachers and peers alike, for many immigrant students the behavior and code of conduct of their local Black peers in the host country represented a site of contamination and shame that they actively sought to differentiate themselves from.

Identity as Agency Another aspect of the construction of identity was the presentation of self in relation to social experiences. This form of implicit identity construction emerges through representation of self and others. The focus is on the ongoing border-crossing experience and the degree of initiative that immigrant students attribute to themselves and others within it. Adolescents need intellectual tools for developing critical consciousness: that is, a robust racial identity as well as a sense of self-agency and self-determination. For integrated and healthy cultural and racial identity development to happen, the peer reference group must include a politics of identity that resists stratifying or subordinating mainstream cultural optics (Murrell, 1999). Identity as agency can be applied to how immigrants construct their agency within the border-crossing experience. A significant finding with regard to identity as agency was immigrant students’ strong desire and sense of self-empowerment and self-determination to succeed. The interviewees seemed to be motivated by both a strong survival instinct and the self-will to make things work in a country that was often hostile to Black foreigners. The degree of initiative and self-agency of immigrant students seemed to be mainly threefold in nature: namely, (a) the manner in which they responded to the challenge of language, (b) their strong work ethic, and (c) their inherent drive to improve the human condition of others. In making these claims, we acknowledge, like Zúñiga and Hamann (2009), that our sample was all of students rather than the entire age cohort. So the stories of any immigrant youths who had less initiative and/or less success with enrolling in South African schools would not be part of this study (because they would not have been at school). That said, from what we

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    65

collected from schools, we did not learn of any suspected large out-of-school immigrant population. Focusing on those we did learn from, the most pertinent challenge for all Black immigrant students was that of language. Languages (not just the language of instruction) played a pivotal role in terms of immigrants’ academic and social exclusion both inside and outside of the classroom. Black Anglophone (African) immigrant students found that they were discriminated against in terms of a lack of proficiency in indigenous African languages. Kevin recollected that he was rather shy when he first came to his school because could not speak any of the indigenous languages. This is why he was determined to empower himself by learning Sepedi. Communication was the problem. I did not know the language, but because I looked like them they thought I know the language. . . . You know when they talk to me, I respond to them in English . . . they only speak Sepedi. But then, I managed to face the system by learning the language. I’m okay now. (Kevin, Zimbabwe)

Likewise, Mike, an Angolan learner at Paucity High, began learning Sepedi as a subject at school so that he could speak to his South African peers at school. His rationale for learning Sepedi was that: Sometimes, when you’re communicating, most of them at this school, they don’t speak proper English. So if I get to know their language, it would be easy to communicate.

Black Francophone (African) immigrant students were doubly disadvantaged, as they came to South Africa lacking proficiency in both English and the indigenous African languages. Consequently, many Francophone immigrant students found solidarity with other immigrant students who could speak French, mainly DRC students, and formed social networks. That time I was still speaking French, I felt very much an outsider, but then they got other newcomers who were not South Africans, who came from the DRC. They’re in my class. They are my friends. (Jafet, DRC)

These Francophone students also shared similar learning experiences as the local Black students in terms of a lack of proficiency in English, which was the medium of instruction at these schools. (The South African constitution recognizes 11 languages: 9 African languages plus English and Afrikaans. Instruction in the biggest of the African languages—e.g., Zulu, Sepedi—is available through grade 3 and then many speakers of these languages transition to English or Afrikaans medium schools that have little ca-

66    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

pacity to work with students who, although on grade level and educated in South Africa, have little developed academic proficiency in these languages. Even though the students we interviewed were at the high school level, it is not surprising that some of their South Africa-born peers preferred African languages and had under-developed academic language proficiency in the medium of their school.) However, the Francophone immigrant students were disadvantaged, as were the Anglophone immigrant students, when the teacher code-switched during teaching in order to ensure that the local Black students fully understood what was being taught. The majority of Black immigrant students at Paucity High were extremely aggrieved and agitated by this practice, as evident from the following responses. I feel excluded. It forces me to learn Sotho. The South African learners and teachers talk Sotho most of the time. They like start speaking English and then, they go into Sotho, like especially if one of the students asks a question, then they reply in Sotho, and then the rest of the lesson continues in Sotho. (Packo, Zambia) The only time I feel like an outsider is when everyone is talking in another language that I don’t understand. Like you have this teacher, she reads in English . . . the essays but then, she explains in Sotho and I cannot understand and we always like, I mean. . . . Can you speak in English? She would speak in English for a while and then she’ll go back to Sotho. (Andrew, Ghana) When they’re teaching us something they don’t really explain in a language we understand, and we have a problem; we can’t really understand what they are saying. (Amani, DRC) When we discussing something in class, if the teacher is teaching in a national language, and they know that we don’t understand . . . we don’t know what they’re talking about. (Melody, Burundi)

Perhaps most provocatively, local Black learners code-switched during breaks to entrench social exclusion by utilizing capability in indigenous languages to exclude immigrant students from their social networks. During breaks one could witness pockets of ethnic groups intensely engaged in casual conversations through the use of indigenous languages. They don’t speak English when we in a group. I have to tell them English, English please, and then they get all nasty and say “you don’t belong here.” (Jedidah, Zambia) I’m learning Sepedi because I want to know how to speak with other people and, sometimes, during break, I know some of the South African children

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    67 are speaking about me, but I don’t understand. So then I will be able to know what they are saying. I want to be able to flow with them. (Annuarite, DRC)

An issue related to language that also mattered for inclusion/exclusion and social identity was that of accent. Accents were a clear indicator of immigrant status, marking difference. But it was the resulting attachments of whether and how that marked difference mattered that made accent a vehicle for subordination or conflict. By naming accents as something that mattered, local Black students and teachers could convey a strong message to immigrant students that they were “the Other”—makwerekwere—and were unwelcome at the school. Intriguingly, during the early years of democracy (i.e., in the 1990s), many local Black students were eager to forfeit their indigenous languages because, as they entered former English-medium Model C and former Indian schools (which also had been better resourced than the African schools), they recognized that English was the language of power. With the increasing influx of Black immigrant students, however, there seems to be a newfound affirmation of indigenous African languages. English may be the increasingly common language of global commerce and a means to connect to the larger world, but the local African languages are a way to assert one’s South African-ness (and immigrants’ lack thereof) in a way that English cannot offer. Black (Indian) immigrant students also experienced language as a challenge, mainly in terms of a lack of proficiency in English, which was the medium of instruction and also the language of conversation in social circles at the school. For them too, academic and social exclusion centered on issues of language and accent: If I could speak English like them they will not call me “Paki” or make me feel like an outsider all the time. (Anash, Pakistan) It’s so difficult because we speak English in school and I can’t understand some words, but my language I can understand everything. (Amjad, India) I have to be better in English so that I can beat the system. (Yash, India) The language makes me feel like an outsider. I was saying to myself sometimes, forget it . . . but this language, I said, I got to know it because otherwise I can’t understand and will be lost. (Priyanka, Sri Lanka)

In order to counteract the politics of identity and to resist the mainstream cultural optics of “the Other,” that had been created by lack of proficiency in the chosen language, almost all immigrant students reacted by expressing the urgency to learn the language so as to empower themselves,

68    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

both academically and socially. Yet an important distinction emerged between black Indian versus black African immigrants. For Indian students the identified target language to better fit in was English, but for the African immigrant students it was indigenous tongues that they felt they needed to develop (or that were the source of their exclusion). Going back to the earlier point that South Africa’s democratic Constitution (the one that President Mandela signed into law in 1996) formally recognized 11 languages, 9 of which were indigenous to Black Africa, Black Africans in South Africa have available social niches reinforced by schooling in indigenous languages. In contrast, though South Asiandescent populations have often maintained languages that their forbearers brought with them to South Africa—for example, Tamil, which is used in households and temple services—those languages are considered “protected,” but not “official” languages of the state. In consequence, the language skills that mark a South Asian immigrant as different from their domestic “Indian” peers present a different profile than those that mark immigrant African students as “not us.”1 Immigrant students came to recognize these available language taxonomies and responded to them with a strong sense of self-agency and self-determination. When I came in 2000, I did not know the language. I made sure I learnt Sepedi so that, when they gossip and stuff, I know what they [South Africans] are saying. (Jeanette, DRC) I came here to continue with my education and concentrate on my school work and to listen to teachers. . . . I came here because I know who I am and what I like most, which is education, and trusting other people. But I realized that although I could speak English, the teachers sometimes spoke another language in class. I realized I had to learn this language fast if I wanted to succeed in life. (Kevin, Zimbabwe)

Another powerful form of identity as agency emerged in the form of work ethics of immigrant students. Although immigrant students in this study did not represent a homogenous group—that is, they came to South Africa from different countries and for different reasons—a common factor among them was their high level of commitment to their studies and their desire to perform well. It would seem that they were prepared from a young age for high-stakes, competitive academic tasks such as achievement tests. These children knew how to study and knew that their parents expected them to succeed (Bankston & Zhou, 2002). They described a strong intrinsic drive and will to succeed.

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    69 What makes me willing and enthusiastic to come to school is just, you know, that in life I want to be someone. I want to achieve things that people have never achieved. I want to go to the highest point where nobody has ever reached. That’s what gives me enthusiasm to want to come to school. (Annuarite, DRC)

Most immigrant students seem to be driven by the philosophy that if they keep quiet, keep to themselves, and do their work, they will be fine. Basically I came to school to do my work and get good results. I don’t care about making friends or whatever at school. (Alice, Rwanda)

Yet tension seemed to surround immigrant students who were serious about their education and wanted to work: The learners misunderstand me. Apparently, you’re cool not doing schoolwork or something like that. Sometimes I’ll be doing my work because I believe in work and working hard for the future. But then they’ll be like “ah you’re a loser you’re doing work,” but for me that’s not the case, you know, actually I believe that doing work is being the winner and not doing work is being the loser. I’m very different because I’m usually with books. (Chanda, Zambia) Sometime they say, “Why do you always do your homework? You are the ones that always getting us into doing homework.” Because the whole class didn’t do their homework, the teacher would think she forgot to give us homework and then they just lie, and Eish2 . . . it’s frustrating. (Kevin, Zimbabwe)

Related to immigrant students’ characterizations of their native-born peers, this raises uncomfortable similarities with Fordham and Ogbu’s (1986) previously referenced and controversial “acting White” explanation for some students’ disengagement with school, and therefore we want to be careful with our explanations. What seems apparent is that immigrant students felt they had opportunities through schooling, but they thought their South Africa-born peers lacked a similar orientation. This may reference the fact that, during apartheid, South African schools were tools of the hated apartheid government and that resisting mandatory lessons in Afrikaans and burning textbooks and schools was a way to protest that oppression (Booyse, 2011). So African natives have needed to learn to embrace the same institution—school—as a vehicle of opportunity that previously was a tool of their parents’ and grandparents’ oppression, an obstacle their immigrant peers did not confront. Additionally/alternatively, in the “having a laff” tradition of the working-class British students that Willis (1977) described, native-born students eyeing the discrepancies in available resources

70    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

at various schools might have been skeptical that school was a place where society really would let them succeed and be upwardly socially mobile. Not trusting schools as a means for opportunity then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and the discrepant faith of immigrant students in schools offering an ameliorative path forward then becomes an existential challenge to the native-born students’ interpretations. How can school be agreed upon as “not an opportunity” when (immigrant) classmates assert that it is? For immigrant students, then, group dynamics were mainly centered on work ethics and academic ability. They asserted a potent drive to excel, and this meant that they were careful in constructing peer groups from classmates who had the same vision of success. Although not with perfect alignment of all immigrants versus all native-borns, this strategy too created social patterns that marked immigrant students and native-born students as of different social formations: I’ll choose my group with the people I know that will not let me down in this project and that we all work together and do well as a group. (Bryan, Cameroon) My group is . . . it’s actually very freaky, they very interested in school, like, even during break we normally sit, like, in the library. (Brenda, Nigeria) I tell the people in my group we do not play, we do not joke, and seriously we are dedicated, doing our work. . . . If you willing to do this, come, if not you can go. (Neil, Angola)

Work ethic, high levels of commitment, self-agency, and the intense will to succeed were characteristics that did not go unnoticed by principals of the identified research sites. Mrs. Wilson at Opulence High attributed these sound characteristics to a “survival instinct”: But these ones [immigrant students], they know that: “This is my life. This is my situation. I’ve got to make the most of it to be better in life.”

Mrs. Kambule, the principal at Paucity High, made a pertinent observation that could hold serious implications for the future of South Africa. Most immigrant students, they are trying to do as much as they can to be the best of the rest. Maybe in ten years’ time we will be saying that they have taken over our jobs, whereas we are not doing enough. A repercussion of this is if local Black students don’t want to learn, and immigrant students are here to learn, they [immigrant students] will complete their schooling and occupy key positions. Then we will be saying they have taken over our positions. But, we did not make use of the opportunities.

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    71

Of course, Mrs. Kambule’s observation presumes a meritocracy, where those best prepared are the ones rewarded with the most opportunity, but given the tensions in South Africa related to immigration, it is not automatic that such an assumption will actually prove true. Most teachers were impressed by the strong work ethic and high levels of commitment of immigrant students. They saw them as extremely hardworking, diligent, respectful, and willing to learn: They will come to you and show you the problem and say “You see ma’am, I’ve got this problem 1, 2, 3 but I’m having difficulty with 4, what can I do?” Or, “Ma’am I’m not good at English, how can you help me?” But, our local Black students never do this. They are just too lazy. (Mrs. Dawson, Opulence High) Some of them are exceptionally bright, especially those that can speak English. I think that they are more determined and it’s something in their nature. They are so different. I wish our local Black students could be more like them. (Mr. Naidoo, Median High) They do better than the indigenous South Africans. They came here with an ambition. They know what they want out of life. They are focused and disciplined. They want to see their goals being achieved. But, most of all they really respect you as a teacher. (Mr. Mazibuko, Paucity High)

Of course, all three teacher responses here are revealing for more than their characterizations of immigrant students. It is worth wondering, for example, about the role of Mrs. Dawson’s beliefs about native-born students have in making hers a classroom where such students are unlikely to seek extra help. Similarly, we can wonder about Mr. Naidoo’s capacity to recognize skills among those who don’t speak English well or as a first language. Finally, we can consider what Mr. Mazibuko’s definition of respect entails and whether it is something students should extend to teachers based on role or whether it is something teachers need to earn. Even though they were the disparaged population in the just quoted teacher comments, many native South African students also identified strong work ethic and good moral conduct as characteristics that enabled immigrant students to succeed in their studies. They are very determined, unlike most South Africans. They concentrate in class and they don’t bunk school. They don’t talk back to teachers. They don’t do drugs. They are here to learn. They respect education more than South African students. (Khotso, South African) Immigrant students are very clever and they work very hard. Education is not a joke for them. They want to be the best in the class. Our South Africans, they just play around, they not serious about studying. . . . They into

72    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities other things, like smoking, drugs, dating, drinking. These things are “cool” for them . . . not education. (Samishka, South African)

In dramatic contrast to the work ethic of immigrant students is the alleged perspective of local black students. “These people do not want to work. They just sit back and expect the state to provide for them” is a popular refrain in business, government, and professional forums around the world (Memela, 2010; Pillay, 2008). This perspective is attributed almost always to out-ofschool factors, notably the home. Consider, for example, the perspective of the principal of Opulence High: South African parents, you know, process it the same way as a South African child. We have an exemption policy at this school that guides the payment of school fees. An immigrant family who was exempted from payment wrote a nice “thank you” letter, which is very different from our South African people. That family chose to say “thank you,” whereas our own people generally don’t. As if it’s your duty to do so. (Mrs. Wilson, Opulence High)

Left unexamined by Mrs. Wilson is the fact that as an ex-Model C school where per student expenditures are literally thousands of rand more per capita than at other public schools (because of parent fees), the school’s legitimacy as a public (rather than exclusive) entity depends on its enrollment of local Blacks for whom fees have been waived (Carter, 2012). Instead, working-class native Black families (who under apartheid would have been excluded from such schools) are rude from her perspective for not saying “thank you.” In turn, it is interesting to conjecture about the different welcome and resulting student group dynamics that are fostered by praising the graciousness of some for whom fees have been waived (i.e., immigrants) in contrast to the alleged fecklessness of local Blacks. Mrs. Wilson’s take finds an echo in comments from an immigrant parent: In our culture, there’s a way to talk to a parents, there is a way to ask, but in South African culture, most of the time you feel like kids when they ask for something they feel they are entitled to it. In the South African culture, I’ve noticed that as soon as the child asks, the parent has this attitude that I am the one who brought him into this world, I’m obliged to give. In my culture, I’m the parent; I’m going to give the guideline he has to follow. He’s going to tell me I want this, as long as what he wants, it is not something that he is going to get. He has to show that he deserves it. This entitlement attitude of the South Africans is not good. (Mrs. Onamaka, DRC parent)

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    73

Teachers joined in attributing a “culture of entitlement” to local Black learners and blamed a strong emphasis on children’s rights without responsibilities and a supposed lack of discipline. The most troublesome are the local students. It has to do with “it’s our country” attitude that they have. The local learners have a great sense of entitlement and at some stage abuse it. In many ways you will find a learner’s conduct is unnecessary and they go out of their way to indicate their presence. They end up in fights with other local students. (Mr. Mau, Median High) South African children have rights; they can just take. Some of them talk to their teachers anyhow. Children’s rights emphasize “rights” and not “responsibilities.” To say that if you want to get this, you do this. You have to be a responsible learner, a responsible citizen. (Mrs. Singh, Median High) They say that the child has a right to education, but when the child brings a weapon to school, does that child have a right to education? Because now, that child is no longer a child, he’s an animal. Education and rights goes with responsibility. It goes with discipline. South African children lack discipline. (Mr. Mazibuko, Paucity High)

Many immigrant and some local Black students also expressed concern about the lackadaisical attitude of local Black students: They don’t even care about work and it actually worries me, maybe it’s because they are from a good country. For me as a person that comes from another country, I’ve seen people suffering. I know what I want from education. South Africans don’t seem to know where they are going. You can just see that they’re not serious about education; they’re not focused. (Vena, Zimbabwe, Opulence High) Immigrants want to achieve in life. The biggest problem with us [South Africans] is that we are lazy and we waste our intelligence on other things. Things like drinking and smoking. Some learners even drop out of school because they are always having a hangover and they can’t concentrate in class. (Nkateklo, South Africa, Median High)

Immigrant students then have had to negotiate a peer culture among local Blacks that is concurrently skeptical of school and viewed skeptically by school. This creates a niche for immigrant students to be “good” and “welcome” in contrast to their peers, but concurrently to be resented by them. Immigrant students’ identity as agency compels negotiating this paradox. This can play out as rejection of local identities, emulation of them (consider the earlier discussion of passing), or the desire to want to help local peers’ change their attitudes about schooling.

74    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities I see a kind of deficiency in the attitude of learners. For me, this is something that I can use to build the school into a better school and make the learners see that what they are doing is wrong. The South African government is giving the youth too many rights. I mean like already at the age of 12 you can have an abortion. That is just wrong in the Bible and it is wrong as a person. (Chanda, Zambia) The Black people the way they treat people. I don’t think we treat people the same way. I’d like to teach them about respect and how to treat people well. (Athailiah, Mozambique) A South African student was using wrong English, that’s why I corrected him to say, that’s not right. That’s wrong English. He spoke incorrectly. The statement was wrong. I tried to correct him, and he said “You come from over there, you come and tell me I’m speaking wrong English?!” (Angela, Nigeria) I can’t say we really different, we look more or less the same, except I am slightly lighter in color then them, but where we are different is in the attitude. The only difference is attitude. I’ll change them. I will want them to understand what education is really about and how to treat elders. They must really get to understand that. (Kevin, Zimbabwe)

In turn, South Africa-born students also have to negotiate this paradox, and it does not always mean rejection of the newcomers, as the following two quotes from Nkateklo suggest. The first one is about a specific example, while the second, where she likened the presence of immigrant students in South Africa to the functioning of a car, was more sweeping. There is a girl in our class who is very intelligent. She is from Ghana. She challenges us to work harder. I try to talk to her as often as I can so that she can help me in mathematics. She’s very good at mathematics. (Nkateklo, South Africa) It would feel like a car without all its parts; it won’t function well. They play a big role in South Africa. We can really learn a lot from them. (Nkateklo, South Africa)

A frustrated teacher, battling to survive at Paucity High, expressed the following sentiments: My wish would be that if South African learners in this school change, they should learn from immigrant learners. They should change to be like immigrant learners, who are respectful, calm, willing to learn, and have good moral values. (Mrs. Appolis)

The first level of analysis of identity engaged with the implicit construction of identity. Focus was on how immigrant students projected themselves

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    75

into specific social roles and expressed their membership into groups and communities. The role of the self as narrative, the self with respect to others as expressed in social orientation, and the role of the self with respect to social experiences as agency were analyzed. The second level of analysis of identity focuses on the explicit construction of self in relation to the immigrant student’s community or to external groups. Emphasis shifts to the way in which immigrant students negotiate affiliations, and identity is analyzed through identification strategies such as identity as social representation and identity as categorization.

Negotiating Affiliations Identity as Social Representation This view of identity focuses on how the construction of self can be linked to the notion of identity as related to social representations (van Dijk, 1998). Identity is a process constructed within social practices and social contexts and subject to continuous evolutions and modifications. Identities are not merely mental concepts, but the processes of constructions and negotiation of identities certainly draw from and contribute to mental representations. Identities reflect and constitute in complex ways ideologies and representations of roles and relationships that go beyond the immediate context of interaction. Definitions of identity and group affiliations are, however, not stable but sensitive to the social constraints posed by the situations in which they become relevant and by the perceived roles of subjects. Thus, the categories used to define self and others cannot be taken as having inherent meanings, since they are applied and understood in different ways according to the contexts in which they appear. A powerful extrinsic force in the formation of identities, especially during the adolescent phase, is that of the “social mirror.” A child’s sense of self is profoundly shaped by the reflections mirrored back to him by significant others (Winnicott, 1971). Human beings are dependent upon the reflection of themselves mirrored by others. These include parents, relatives, adult caretakers, siblings, teachers, peers, employers, the media, and even people on the street (Suárez-Orozco, 2000). How does society reflect who you are? When the reflected image is generally positive, the individual is able to feel a sense of self-worth and competence. When the reflection is generally negative, it is extremely difficult to maintain an unblemished sense of self-worth. These truisms seem to hold for both immigrant and locally born Black students in South African schools. Immigrant children are consistently compelled to participate in the process of “double-consciousness” Du Bois (1903/1989). They constantly

76    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities

need to not only see the world, but concurrently register how the world sees them. Although not fully deterministic, their sense of self-worth arises substantively from how they think they are viewed in the eyes of others. If those views or expectations are of apathy, irresponsibility, low intelligence, or even danger, the outcomes can be toxic. Such reflections when received from a number of mirrors can lead to devastating outcomes (Adam, 1990). Consider both how Moosa is viewed and his related sense of self-worth: When the learners choose groups, most of the time, I don’t have a group. I have to pay to be in a group. I don’t speak English good. It’s a language problem, but they see I am not good [academically]. I feel bad. Indians tell me to go back to my country. They don’t like me because I am from Pakistan. They call me a “Paki.” They chase me away all the time. They say “our government should take you back to Pakistan.” I wish I could go back; I am not happy here [sobs].

Black indigenous students victimized Black (African) immigrant students, making their image in the social mirror that of makwerekwere. As previously noted, makwerekwere is the derogatory term used by Black South Africans to describe non-South African Blacks (referring to Black immigrants from the rest of Africa). Black South Africans have found an easy explanation for the myriad problems of poverty, housing, transportation, unemployment, crime, violence, and the decay of public and social infrastructure: “Ah, the makwerekwere”! Adesanmi (2008, p. 2) cynically asserted, “Black South Africa has manufactured the makwerekwere as her unique postApartheid contribution to the gory pantheon of small-minded hate.” Identities reflect and constitute in complex ways ideologies and representations of roles and relationships that go beyond the immediate context of interaction. And this was nowhere more clearly enacted than on the classroom floor and school grounds of South African public schools. The common response from almost all Black (African) immigrant students in terms of identity as social representation was the term makwerekwere. Many Black immigrant students vehemently objected to this label and found it abhorrent, but they agreed that it named the lens that they were often viewed through. They see me as an outsider, a makwerekwere. They don’t like us. The thing about immigrant students, most of them are clever, they’re always in their books. South Africans must change their attitude towards foreigners. Just hatred, I don’t know. It’s just the way things are. I think it is stupid, but anyway. . . . I think it is more than any country in the world. This country should be more aware because of apartheid, the way Whites were treating them.

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    77 They should be treating foreigners with more dignity and respect, because they knew it was unfair the way they were treated. (Belece, Rwanda) They tell me to go back to where I came from. . . . I am a foreigner, a makwerekwere or something like that. I hate that word. (Helen, Mozambique)

The ripple effects of the xenophobic attacks of May 2008 were clearly visible in schools. While many worried that the xenophobic violence betrayed fundamental values of community, inclusion, participation, and ubuntu, the message to at least some of the youth of South Africa by means of role-play and behavior was that foreigners should be treated with hostility. Identities were also constructed within social practices and social contexts and subject to continuous evolutions and modifications. In order to counteract the social representation of being a foreigner, and to seek a sense of inclusion, many Black (African) immigrant students asserted a “continental identity” to claim a sense of solidarity with local Black students. Thus, their identities became subjected to a process of both evolution and contestation within the new social context. The subordinating and differentiating identity was rejected: In Zimbabwe, I was a Zimbabwean, but now they say Unapa is a makwerekwere. That’s not who I am. I am an African from Zimbabwe. (Unapa, Zimbabwe) I’m a Congolese girl from the DRC. They say I am a foreigner, a makwerekwere, and they push me and say “Go back to your country.” I don’t see myself as a foreigner. I am an African from Africa. (Jeanette, DRC)

Brenda, a Nigerian found that within the new social context she had been given an additional identity, one that she detested, They call me a foreigner because of my accent. They like make jokes about the way I talk. They also tease me and call me “Brenda Fassie.” This really hurts. I don’t like this because I don’t want to be somebody else, especially someone like Brenda Fassie. I don’t know her. I was told she was a singer. I saw some of her pictures and I don’t like the way she dresses. I will never dress like that. (Brenda, Nigeria)3

The construction of the self as related to social representations is also sensitive to social constraints that are posed by situations in which they become relevant and by the perceived roles of subjects. Many immigrant students experienced social constraints in terms of their strong work ethic and were perceived by others as bookworms.

78    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities They see me as different because of my accent and my education. They say I work and then they don’t like it. They call me makwerekwere. In their eyes I am a foreigner; I don’t belong here. But I do . . . I am also an African. (Jafet, DRC) They take me as this worm [bookworm] guy . . . they think that I am this kind of straightforward stiff . . . because I don’t do what they do. Most South Africans don’t want to work. They just want the easy way out. (Andrew, Ghana)

Since identities are applied and understood in different ways according to the contexts, they cannot be taken as having inherent meanings. The label makwerekwere was something that was externally imposed on Black immigrant students and as such it did not hold any innate meaning for them. Melody tried to reject this label and to establish a sense of commonality in the following way: They say you foreigner, makwerekwere . . . but I tell them look at yourself. I’m Black. You’re Black. There’s nothing different, and they just look at me. (Melody, Burundi)

Individual contestations of assigned identity matter, of course, but the looks Melody describes highlight the uphill challenge they present in the face of a larger discourse that incessantly and often pejoratively compares and contrasts Black South Africans and Black immigrants. Mike (below) reacted by rejecting the label of makewerewere and by finding a sense of solidarity with people who came from his country of origin. He intentionally did not mingle with local Black students: Eish, they do classify me as like a foreigner. I don’t hang with South Africans. I hang with Congolese people from my country. Some of them [South Africans] say go back to your country. (Mike, DRC)

Immigrant students’ construction of identity as related to social representations indicated their dependence on the social context and reinforced the notion that identities are not merely mental concepts, but that the social processes of construction and negotiation of identities draw from and contribute to mental representations (Vandeyar, 2011).

Identity as Categorization Categorization devices are a crucial area for the analysis of identities because the identifications and actions, plus the negotiation of position with respect to identities and actions, are both reflective and constitutive of social processes of ascription and perception. According to this view, people

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    79

are not seen as having an identity per se, but rather are “cast into a category with associated characteristics or features” (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998, p. 3). Categorization reflects the symbolic systems and processes underlining the ascription of group membership and is central to the formation of social identities because these are often defined on the basis of the individual’s sense of belonging to groups. Such systems are molds or templates provided by the culture within which individuals and groups construct oppositions and affiliations, similarities and differences (Becker, 1990). Therefore, they are basic to the construction of social meanings in general and of identity in particular. Tajfel (1981) argues that social identity is “that part of an individual’s self concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership in a social group (or groups) together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership” (p. 255). The identification and classification of groups is therefore at the heart of the construction of specific identities (Barth, 1969; Durkheim, 1954; Levi-Strauss, 1963). For Black immigrant students in particular, developing a new identity based on extant ethnic categories involves many dilemmas. First, immigrants need to accept the idea of using and applying ethnic categorizations, although other traits of their definition as human beings—such as personality/character traits, social class, or occupation—might be more salient to them. Second, they need to build specific connections between what they feel they are as individuals and the categories socially available to them. Thus they must accept both being categorized and categorizing others in terms of ethnic identity and develop their own understanding of these categories. As we have seen, immigrants who arrive in South Africa and find themselves classified in ethnic terms and labeled as Black or Africans often feel that other kinds of descriptions may be more suitable to identify them. Still, the apartheid history of South Africans makes it easy to understand both why ethnic categorizations remain central in the social and political landscape of South Africa and why it is so fraught. This widespread use of ethnic categories favors the formation of a stereotyped vision in which the identity of individuals is strongly shaped by their ascribed ethnic affiliation and the social meanings associated with that affiliation, as evident from this vignette. Interviewer: Would you class yourself according to color? Immigrant: Yes. Interviewer: Who would you say you are? Immigrant: I’m Black; I’m African.

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Interviewer: Why do you say you are an African? Immigrant: Because I originate from Africa. Interviewer: And why do you call yourself Black? Immigrant: Because that’s how we’re classified by the South African government. Interviewer: And are you happy with that? Immigrant: Not really, because I’ve heard so many people complain about being called Black because our skin color is naturally black. Interviewer: So you won’t classify yourself as Black in Zambia? Immigrant: Me, no, no, no definitely not! I was not identified as “Black” in Zambia, but here I am told that I am “Black” because I look more like the local Black Africans than like the Indians and Whites. Interviewer: In Zambia, how would you classify yourself? Immigrant: As African. Interviewer: Just African? Immigrant: Yes. It is only when I came to South Africa that I realized that I’ve got another label, now I am a Black African. Interviewer: How does this make you feel? Immigrant: I feel bad because I am not “Black,” I am “African”... because I come from Africa. I am not happy about being called Black. I prefer being called African. Also, my culture is totally different from theirs [Black South Africans] and in my culture we are taught to respect and behave well. We also dress differently. There are so many differences with them so how can people see me like one of them? I am just an African student in South Africa from Zambia. . . . All these other labels, black and all that, doesn’t get into my identity. Other immigrant students shared similar perspectives, In Burundi we just say our culture and language, but when I came to South Africa I learnt that I am now ‘Black’. (Elufisan, Burundi) I am Zimbabwean and I’m Black and I speak Kalanga . . . I say I am “Black” because when I came to South Africa I was told by the learners, teachers, and the principal that I am Black and I could also see that I look like the “Black South African.” No, in Zimbabwe I was not “Black.” I was just from the Kalanga tribe. (Alice, Zimbabwe)

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Both institutional practices of ethnic labeling and social experiences with other local students give ethnicity (in the wide sense of racial and/or national origin) a relevance that makes it one of the most important categories provided by society for individual membership affiliation and ascription. What was noted is that in the case of categorical identifications—such as nationality, ethnicity, or race—immigrant students link their identity to wider social constructions. These mainstream ideologies about race and ethnicity circulated through public discourse. They shaped conceptualizations about self and others in local communities and undergirded the practices of inclusion, exclusion, and resistance pursued by immigrants and others as social agents. The dynamics of identity as categorization played out differently for Black (African) immigrant students and Black (Indian) immigrant students. The indigenous African learners at the school identified the immigrant (Indian) learner as “just another Indian student in the school.” However, the indigenous Indian learners classified immigrant students according to countries of origin and at times used derogative terms to identify the foreign “Other.” What Rushdie (1989, p. 11) has referred to as a “demonizing process” of the Other was at work here, and the consequences were predictably disastrous. They say I am from Sri Lanka. Mostly the South African Indian children say this. To the Blacks [Africans], I am just another Indian student at this school. (Samishka, Sri Lanka)

For this to be demonizing rather than just descriptive, the teaser or bully needs to know not just different meanings associated with different nationalities, but also how a “mistaken” ascription will be understood, as the example below illustrates. Some people [Indian learners] call me “Paki.” I hate that word. This makes me angry. I tell them I am not from Pakistan, but I am from India. I don’t like the name Paki. (Moosa, India)

This labeling is particularly potent because of the historic and contemporary discord between India and Pakistan. The labeling is intended to insult and subordinate and it requires the recipient to agree that it is insulting. Black indigenous students, on the other hand, categorized Black (African) immigrant students according to perceptions of their country of origin and ideologies and sentiments expressed by fellow indigenous Africans about immigrants from particular countries. For example,

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Nigerians were categorized as thieves, womanizers, drug lords, and people who were unhygienic. These Nigerians are all criminals! When they are not busy trafficking drugs, they are taking over our jobs, our houses and, worse, our women. All foreigners must leave this country! (Ngidi, South Africa) Yeah, like the Nigerians. They stink, they dirty, and they are the ones that steal. Whenever someone’s cell phone is stolen at school, the Nigerians are the first suspects. (Sipho, South Africa) Yes, one guy in my class, he’s from Nigeria. The other day, when he brought his food from home, the class laughed at it and said it stinks. (Loyiso, South Africa)

Ngidi’s “our women” comment clarifies that xenophobia can be intertwined with other problematic views (in this case misogynistic or patriarchal ones), although this study does not more closely examine these. As a second example, Zimbabweans were ostracized because of the perception that they came from a poverty-stricken country that lacked resources and a country that would seem to be “uncivilized” or “backward” in some ways: Before the exam we were in the hall and my friend and I were playing the piano in the hall. This South African guy comes in and he says “is there no piano in your country?” I thought like, “What? Do you think we are in our country?” (Aline, Zimbabwe) No, but some people would just be surprised because when I swim some people will be surprised. Oh, you can swim and which school did attend? Are there swimming pools in Zimbabwe . . . and stuff? I have to tell them the truth, that there are swimming pools in Zimbabwe and that they mustn’t always, like, criticize that story which is happening to what I am. (Alice, Zimbabwe)

A third example of xenophobic differentiation relates to categorization based on so-called “shades of Blackness.” Immigrant students were categorized according to their skin pigmentation. Most students who come from Congo, Zambia, Somalia, and Malawi are naturally darker skinned than indigenous South African learners. According to one of the principals, They say this is a terrible thing which is part of our country, how dark the person is, because now South African students identify and discriminate against Black immigrant students on the basis of darkness of skin color because they say that person’s too dark to be South African. This places the immigrant child under much stress and the child feels isolated. (Principal, Opulent High)

Some immigrant student responses echoed this:

So How Do South African Immigrant Students Identify?    83 They use my surname Dakkar to mock at me and they say I am dark. I am a makwerekwere and I must go back to Zambia. (Effie, Zambia) They say you are black, like you are black more than other learners; you must be Congolese or maybe you from Somalia? (Jasmine, Malawi) There was this one time we were arguing with some other people. So they were dissing me [slang—insult someone] and so I also dissed them and they say I’m dark. I must go back to Malawi and stuff. (Raphael, Nigeria)

Jasmine’s and Raphael’s responses also hint at still another dynamic— the conscious mischaracterization of immigrant students’ backgrounds. Nigeria is not Malawi; Malawi is not Congo, nor Somalia. The immigrant students did not clarify whether they thought these mistaken attributions were intentional or ignorant, but in either scenario they suggest that native students were dismissive of the idea that it mattered to accurately know one’s immigrant peers. Some immigrant students also experienced multiple categorizations within the same context (e.g., contested “darker” identity according to peers, but invisibility according to teachers). For instance, an immigrant student from Congo claimed that White teachers saw her as a Black South African. She said they did not know the difference. The following response from one of the teachers corroborates this claim: We don’t have the knowledge, not even me as an academic head of the grade 10s. We just see them like one of the local Black students. I’m not even aware of who is an immigrant and who is not. (Mrs. McNair, White teacher, Opulent High)

Clearly the “better” and “worse” characterizations that seem to be in play as immigrant students and indigenous South Africans compare themselves to each other is problematic, but some educators’ blindness to difference is also problematic. As we have acknowledged in other studies (Vandeyar & Jansen, 2008), difference can be acknowledged and treated as a resource. Immigrant students did not describe undifferentiated treatment from peers nor the larger society. One explained that: Some White and Indian students see me as a person from Congo and want to know more about my culture. Black students see me as a makwerekwere. This makes me angry, very angry at the Black people because I know for a fact that during the apartheid a lot of the leaders went to neighboring countries of Africa to get their degrees, to get everything together to make South Africa better and they were accepted there and the fact that we’re

84    Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities here and they say foreigners take our jobs and foreigners do crime and they just classify every foreigner under the group that I’m not, I am angry at the fact that . . . [pause] there’re some foreigners that work for a living. There’re some foreigners that suffer and make real money for their living and not sell drugs and stuff and they contribute to their economy positively and to be pushed under the negative bunch, I thought that was unfair. I was quite angry. (Vanessa, DRC)

As noted with the earlier allusion to Willis’ (1977) Learning to Labor, this immigrant student has “partially penetrated” the hegemonic order. That is, she has recognized the hypocrisy of Black Africa’s historic welcome of South Africa’s resistance leaders during apartheid not being reciprocated by indigenous South Africans hosting, but instead of seeing this hypocrisy as a less explicitly racial continuation of the sharp stratification that had marked South Africa during apartheid, she instead remained divided from her indigenous peers. At Median High, a Black (Indian) immigrant student shares similar experiences: Indian students tease me. They see me as a Paki; they dance like from Pakistan. [Meanwhile], teachers treat me like a South African Indian (Moosa, India)

In addition to “pigmentocracy,” powerful and usually differentiating categorizations also centered on language. Immigrant students were immediately categorized as immigrant because of their lack of prowess in language. Again, this played out differently between Indian and African immigrant students. Immigrant (Indian) students were identified because of poor language proficiency in English. Immigrant (African) students were ostracized and categorized because of their lack of proficiency in the Black indigenous languages of South Africa. Language is an issue. It marks you as an immigrant. For instance, when people speak in Zulu, I don’t understand and I’m quite assertive and I tell them, “Excuse me I’m here, please speak English. Let’s all understand.” They continue speaking in Zulu and then they say I am a makwerekwere and should go back to my country. This is the land of the Zulus. (Kevin, Zimbabwe) Yes, sometimes. Like when they speak their local South African languages, I try to join them but it’s just hard and difficult. So you feel you’re excluded, like you don’t belong. (Chanda, Zambia)

Surnames of Black immigrant students were also used as a means of categorization. Many of these students had unusual surnames that imme-

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diately served firstly as an identity indicator and secondly as a means for both academic and social exclusion and ostracism. For example, Chizema, Uwitonge, Eguale, Lutumba, Sakyi, Fundi, Zamam-al-Haq, Chadar, Sharma, Puriwala are all uncommon surnames in the South African context. Students with such names could be marked as different and subject to ensuing bullying or slighting. I am misunderstood by some South African Indians because they come from South Africa and I come from India and sometimes they chase the Indian learners [who come from India]. When I say something in English, I can’t talk properly, so they make fun of me in class. They chase me out of class. They make fun of my surname, Puriwala. (Jamaal, India) Sometimes when the teacher takes roll call in the mornings and calls out our names, we can hear some students whisper “makwerekwere,” and sometimes they snicker and make fun of our surnames. (Jafet, DRC)

Immigrant students were often not allowed to assert their own identities or to viably contest the characterizations that sometimes went with the categories/memberships that they were ascribed. Such categorization practices negatively influenced many immigrant students’ formation of social identities and their sense of belonging to groups. Meanwhile, any advantage that it seemed to extend to most South Africans were concurrently illusory, as the solidarity needed to change South Africa’s deeply imbued stratification was routinely undermined.

Conclusion Findings reveal that the ways in which immigrant students distinguished themselves from others and ascribed membership into groups varied a great deal according to social and personal circumstances but were also crucially limited by the repertoire of identities available in the society. Immigrant students constructed complex, plural identities that drew on the moral compass of their home district to justify their belonging to their nation-state of origin. At the same time, they reconfigured to situate themselves as South African citizens and thereby tried to inoculate themselves from pressures to return home. They negotiated the polarities of belonging—the double consciousness resultant from negotiating two social worlds—by constantly redefining their place in the host society and their position with respect to other social groups, using (and being limited by) the ethnic and racial affiliations available within specific categories in South African society. As part of all this positioning, they created networks of support that helped to protect

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them from their “foreignness” in a country that has become increasingly hostile to immigrants. Of course, our account is not just of or from the immigrant students themselves. We have also shared the perspectives of teachers and South Africaborn peers. These participants in immigrant students’ lives have also helped create and circumscribe the categories and the meanings of those categories that the immigrant students negotiate. Crucially, both immigrant students and South African peers and teachers seem to concur that immigrant students are more dedicated to their studies and less skeptical of school as an institution than their indigenous peers. These observations are broadly in circulation and no doubt offered with sincerity and accuracy. They seem, however, to lament the Black South African hostility to newcomers without questioning how this lateral tension between subordinated groups (counting immigrants as subordinated and Black South Africans as long subordinated) protects the perpetuation of the stratified social order and schools’ roles in naturalizing that stratification. The discourse is comparative about which students work harder, rather than about whether South African schools broadly support indigenous non-White students (which historically they have not) or whether South Africa’s political economy depends on the stratification of its students rather than their broad success. Critical theorist Ira Shor (1986) once asserted that schooling is successful to the extent that it stratifies students’ self-expectations in anticipation of their joining an unequal social order. We will leave it to readers to determine how well his words might explain the cases just related, but, as we will further develop, it does seem interesting to ask whose interests are served when subordinated populations feel grievance at each other rather than a solidarity that allows a more general questioning of status quo practices to be pursued.

Notes 1. Semiotician Tzvetan Todorov (1984) offered a pithy definition of “the Other” as those who are “not us.” That is what is being evoked here. 2. “Eish” is a South African slang word originating from Black Africans that is used to express everything ranging from frustration to surprise to disapproval, but also just everyday acknowledgement of things you can’t change—like “Eish, the traffic is bad today.” It is heard frequently each and every day and can also used to indicate displeasure. For example: “At the time I was the only Black guy and I used to ask myself ‘Eish, what am I doing here?’” 3. Brenda Fassie was a highly popular anti-apartheid singer, known also for her outrageousness, bisexuality, and battles with drug addiction, who died in 2004. It seems quite plausible that a South African student could variously call someone “Brenda Fassie” as a tribute, a word play, or an insult. Brenda clearly heard it as an intended insult.

4 New Insights

A conception of “identity” which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. —Hall, 1993, pp. 401–402

Introduction Theorists in the field argue that it is important to develop knowledge on the self-perception and identity formation among immigrants, as such knowledge may lead to better understandings of the factors that help immigrants integrate or that, alternatively, prompt their isolation within the host society (Chavez, 1992, 1994; Rosaldo, 1993). It is mainly through the analysis of data and the consideration of the contextualization cues that speakers use to convey specific meanings (Gumperz, 1992) that it is possible to generate hypotheses on how members of a community represent and negotiate their identities and sense of belonging to social categories. Accounts emanating from this research study were presented in the previous chapter. In this chapter an attempt will be made to analyze and discuss these findings and to foreground these findings against the research questions, literature review, and theoretical frameworks of this study. Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities, pages 87–104 Copyright © 2015 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Echoing the Literature The Social Mirror A child’s sense of self is profoundly shaped by the reflections mirrored back to him by significant others (Winnicott, 1971). A review of the voluminous literature in the field has revealed that societal attitudes and perceptions towards immigrants in some societies can present a negative social mirror that makes it extremely difficult for the individual to maintain an unblemished sense of self-worth (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983; Spencer, 2005; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001; Suárez-Orozco, 2000, 2004; Winicott, 1971). In this dynamic, newcomers may become resigned to the negative reflections, leading to a sense of hopelessness and self-deprecation that may, in turn, result in low aspirations and self-defeating behaviors (Suárez-Orozco, 2004). The general affects associated with this pathway are depression and passivity. We too found this. Some immigrants in this study received largely negative reflections from society, which adversely inhibited their capacity for self-experience and integration and interfered with their process of personalization. Yet depression and passivity are hardly the right frames to describe all of our sample.

Double Consciousness “Double consciousness is a sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in contempt and pity” (Du Bois, as cited in Suárez-Orozco & SuárezOrozco, 2001, p. 99). The literature reports that immigrant students all over the world are consistently subjected to the process of “double-consciousness” (Du Bois, 1903/1989). They have to constantly look at themselves and consider how they are being appraised through the eyes of others. When the expectations are of apathy, irresponsibility, low intelligence, and even danger, the outcome can be toxic. These reflections—received in a number of mirrors, including the media, classroom, and street—can lead to devastating outcomes (Adam, 1990). Both the negative mirroring and its consequences seemed operative in our study. Both Black (African) and Black (Indian) immigrant students measured their sense of self-worth through the eyes of others, as was the case with Moosa, an immigrant from India, and Alice, an immigrant from Zimbabwe. The negative reflections they received through a number of mirrors completely broke down their self-esteem to such an extent that they both sobbed uncontrollably during the interview sessions. These students were clearly experiencing “immigrant stress” as reported in much of the literature and undertook the

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evaluation of “everyday experiences, the past, and the future, with a double consciousness garnered from transnational links and a transnational conception of self” (Gilbert, 2001).

Dominating Ethnic Identities Similar to the literature, almost all immigrant students in this study presented a dominating ethnic identity in their self-definition (i.e., their ethnicity was more salient than other identity features for shaping their interaction with the social world and that world’s interaction with them). This “overarching identity” often led to nostalgic ideational linkages to their country of origin, which, in turn, informed their daily existence in South Africa. Immigrant students’ ethnic identification began with the application of a label to themselves in a cognitive process of self-categorization, involving not only a claim to membership in a group or category, but also a contrast of one’s group or category with other groups or categories. Such self-definitions also carried affective meaning, implying a psychological bond with others that tends to serve psychologically protective functions (Deaux, 1996; Rumbaut, 2005). Ethnic self-awareness was either heightened or blurred, depending on the degree of dissonance or consonance of the social contexts that are basic to identity formation. The majority of immigrant students heightened their ethnic self-awareness in forming their identity. This resonates with Phinney (1990), who argued that individuals with a strong sense of ethnic or national identity have deeply ingrained their ethnicity or nationality into their sense of self and their interactions with the social world. A strong ethnic identity can be a resource that contributes to the resilience of individuals facing the challenges of adapting to a new society (García, 2001). Their ethnic identity, or their sense of belonging to their culture of origin, is a key factor in the ways they adaptively respond to challenges in their new country. We need to understand, in a South African context, the multiple pathways that lead to the development of a secure ethnic identity, the way these pathways may change with time, and the factors that influence positive or negative identity outcomes.

Hyphenated Identities Findings of this research study overlapped with the literature in the field regarding hyphenated identities (Vandeyar, 2011). Many students chose a hyphenated identity: for example, Congolese-South African, SriLankan-South African, and Rwandan-South African. The difference, however, was that the hyphen was heavily skewed in favor of their ethnicity and country of origin. The additive “South African,” which was always placed

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second, seemed to be more for political gain and forging a sense of belonging in a strange land. It was less for personal or intrinsic gain. Almost all immigrants emphasized that irrespective of where they were (i.e., in South Africa), they wished to be identified and remain true to their country of birth and ancestral and ethnic roots. (Whether they actually would be welcomed back as “untainted” by South Africa were they to remigrate to their birth countries was never tested, but there is a literature [e.g., Albino Serrano, 1998; Reyes, 2000] from elsewhere in the world that suggests this might not be unproblematic.) The immigrant students did not want to be identified solely as “South African.” This stance likely reflected both the resistance to full welcome that they had encountered from South African peers and the pejorative characterizations—that is, degenerative values and morals—that encompassed the available South African identities.

Language and Accent As reported in the voluminous literature, immigrants all over the world struggle with the issue of the language of the host country. Immigrants in South Africa struggle with language issues too, but not necessarily in the same ways that are so well documented elsewhere. In South Africa, language has become a tool of power in typical and very atypical ways. In all of the research sites, English was used as a means of instruction. South Africa still has Afrikaans-medium high schools, but our study was not in such schools. Although South Africa formally recognizes nine more languages, those languages are not the formal medium for any schooling after the primary level. In one of our sites English was used by South Africa-born Indian students as a way to exclude South Asian immigrants. Such exclusion is unfortunate, but it is similar to what has been recorded elsewhere. However, in the one school that had a majority of Black immigrant students, indigenous students and the teacher regularly code-switched to an indigenous language (Sepedi). Thus, Anglophone students were disadvantaged and Francophone students were doubly disadvantaged. Language became a tool of excluding and subordinating immigrants on the classroom floor and the school grounds. Indigenous Black students felt a sense of power over Black immigrant students in terms of language. This power was phantasmagoric, however. The students who performed their local identity by using the local language were not advantaged by that use in terms of graduation rates or opportunities after completing school. Locals found no solidarity with newcomers and (when using local languages instead of English) perhaps more directly hindered their classmates’ learning, but this xenophobic display was also self-defeating. It enabled their being la-

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beled as non-academic and undeserving, views that were only too easy to keep in circulation in long-stratified South African society. Instead of finding solidarity and shared purpose in building a new social order—one that could challenge the unequal distributions captured in our pseudonyms of Opulence, Median, and Paucity High Schools—indigenous students resisted supporting immigrants’ integration. In turn, instead of the immigrant students struggling on their own behalf and that of their more numerous native peers, many instead tried to except themselves from those peers and to live up to old definitions of what constituted school success (i.e., unquestioning diligence and respect).

Identity as Categorization Much of the literature reports on what is termed “ascribed identity.” Immigrants worldwide are plugged into a category within the social taxonomy of the host society. In Rumbaut’s words: “Their social identities forged in terms of those contrasts with others, represented the way they selfconsciously defined the situation in which they found themselves and constructed an ongoing account of who ‘we’—and ‘they’—are” (2008, p. 14). Reactions of South Africa to the influx of black immigrants into the country have been no different. With little attention to whatever identities immigrants might have already brought with them, immigrant students were cast into available categories with associated characteristics or features. This categorization process negatively influenced many immigrant students’ formation of social identities and their sense of belonging to groups. South Africa greeted immigrants with the apartheid-era labels of “Black” and “Indian” (both of which were subordinate to “White”) and then created the new one—“Makwerekwere”—that so many of the immigrants in our study decried. Although born after the advent of democracy, the effects of the apartheid system were clearly visible in the psyche of South African students. Many indigenous students still classified themselves according to skin color. In contrast, immigrant students did not readily classify themselves according to a skin pigmentocracy. Instead, they initially identified themselves in terms of personality traits and subsequently in terms of ethnicity linked to culture, traditions, language and country of origin. The label of “Black” was something that was ascribed to them on entry into the host country and something that they learned to incorporate as part of their identity, given that they shared similar phenotype features as indigenous Black students, although the solidarity of Indian, Colored, and African resisters to apartheid all co-opting the term “Black” was uncommon and perhaps no longer seen as socially available.

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Immigrant students were categorized according to the “blackness” of their skin pigmentation. “Shades of blackness” seemed to be the operative principle for placement and displacement. (We mean the informal but still consequential organization of peer hierarchies; pigmentocracy was not officially part of any school’s practice.) Students who came from Congo, Zambia, Somalia, and Malawi were usually naturally darker skinned than indigenous South African learners, and this phenotypic difference was routinely referenced as a tool to exclude or oppress. Many Black immigrant students just could not understand why Black indigenous students who were once victims of oppression themselves could not be more gracious and accepting of Black immigrant students. The reactions of indigenous students to Black immigrant students reflect the continued racial stratification that is part of the fabric of South Africa. In a CRT analysis, this endorses the tenet that races are categories society creates and that individual, cultural, and institutional expressions of racism are part of the dominant cultural ideology that manifests in multiple contexts. Current manifestations of racial stratification occur within a broader historical landscape that has shaped the present forms and expressions of racism and “remain complexly articulated, deeply embedded, and subtly intertwined with seemingly neutral or innocent social phenomena” (Essed, 2001, p. 179).

Homogeneous Categorization of Blacks As reported in the literature, this study too revealed that there was a homogenizing categorization of Blacks into one amorphous group by other racial groups, in which the textured nuances in terms of nationality, ethnicity, language, and other cultural signifiers seemed to be largely ignored (Awokoya & Clark, 2008). Here we need to distinguish that we are using Black a little less inclusively than before. As noted, Black was a co-opted label of solidarity for Indians, Coloreds, and Africans during the anti-apartheid struggles, but here we mean that African immigrants and local African-descent South Africans were lumped together. Black immigrants were racialized as Black and were, therefore, subjected to similar racial prejudices and discrimination as their native Black counterparts. Many immigrant students were viewed as if they were local Black students by teachers and learners from other racial groups. A similar dynamic applied to immigrant Indian learners. The local Indian learners and teachers distinguished the difference between local and immigrant, but other race groups just saw immigrant Indian children as local Indian children. The identity “Indian,” however, was not as consistently pathologized as feckless, anti-academic, or even dangerous, like that

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attributed to those of African backgrounds. Still, as revealed in the previous chapter, anti-South Asian immigrant storylines were operative and did affect the school welcome available to the racially labeled students.

Differences The Social Mirror In general, however, many of the immigrant students, despite the negative mirror of the classroom and the media especially in terms of xenophobia and the labeling as makwerekwere, were resilient against the projected image in the mirror. They vehemently objected to and found abhorrent labels such as makwerekwere and Paki. Immigrant students’ construction of identity indicated their dependence on the social context and reinforced the notion that identities are not merely mental concepts, but that the processes of construction and social negotiation of identities draw from and contribute to mental representations. Many of the immigrant students claimed greater self-worth and esteem than that of the local Black students and viewed the host country as a site of contamination and shame. Many Black immigrant students did not internalize the projected images from their South Africa-born peers, but used them to their own advantage, whether differentiating themselves from extant negative portrayals of local Blacks (i.e., what they were not) or asserting affiliations with home countries or South African exemplars of success (i.e., what they proposed to be). For this last we are thinking of immigrants’ claims to be more serious students than their native-born peers and teachers and some native-born students’ echoes of those claims.

Psychosocial Passing The concept of “passing” within the Black community refers to Blacks who pass for White because of their light skin color (Murrell, 1999). “Psychosocial passing” refers to people who seek to render invisible the visible differences between themselves and a desired or chosen reference group. By behaving in ways that are consistent with other group members, they subconsciously seek to avoid having their differences noticed. Phenotypic racial features have considerable implications for the ease of assimilation. South Africa has witnessed Black immigrants passing as indigenous students with relative ease because of phenotypic overlap. Immigrant students did tell us of such passing as a way to avoid the invective sometimes directed at the newcomers. However, racial identity and racial identification are influenced by the racial stratification of South African society, so some of the Black immigrant stu-

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dents attempted to resist passing into some of the extant categories that they were plugged into. Instead, they sought exposure, familiarity, and affirming contexts that provided alternative and more empowering meanings. In a limited sense, this was like passing as White, in the sense that it was a previously White archetype of serious academic identity that many aspired to. However, African and South Asian immigrants were not readily seen as White (the phenotypic differences being obvious), nor did they necessarily want to be, as Whiteness remained uncomfortably associated with the oppression of apartheid. Indeed, many seemed most eager for a kind of across-the-board invisibility of race/ethnicity, not wanting to be associated with the fecklessness ascribed to local South African Blacks, nor the ugliness of the makwerekwere label, nor the responsibility for the persistent inequality that Whites had erected. Instead they seemed to long for an actual meritocracy to which heritage—however proud one might be of it—was irrelevant. All of these stances in a sense describe an attempted rejection of the social mirror and the identities it availed, but also a discomfort with psychosocial passing, which did not seem to transcend what remained problematic about each of the extant identities.

Identity Pathways A review of the voluminous literature in the field revealed that immigrant students tended to follow one of the three dominant styles of identity pathways: namely, ethnic flight, adversarial, and bicultural. Youth clustering around the ethnic flight style often struggle to mimic the dominant group and may attempt to join them, leaving their own ethnic group behind. In strong contrast, in this research study, immigrant students did not forsake their own ethnic groups. They tended to assert solidarity with and support by their own ethnic groups, as evident from “ethnic pockets” of homogeneous groupings that surfaced during breaks. Some immigrant students tried to gain access to the majority group by attempting to learn the local language, but it was not clear that they did so in an effort to join that group. In fact, a better explanation is that they hoped to use language skills to avoid some of the aspersions directed at the makwerekwere, but that this passing was tactical rather than transformative and that primary identity affiliations remained with their ethno-national backgrounds. Encouraging the sharp limitations on how much to affiliate with Black South African identities was their frequent concurrence with the widely extant framings that negatively labeled the majority local ethnic groups as lacking, in terms of values, morals, education, and culture. The adversarial identity pathway involves a process of forging a reactive ethnicity in the face of perceived threats, persecution, discrimination, and

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exclusion (Rumbaut, 2005). It is one mode of ethnic identity formation highlighting the role of a hostile context of reception in accounting for the rise rather than the erosion of ethnicity (Aleinikoff & Rubén, 1998; Portes & Rumbaut, 1996). None of the Black immigrant students chose to willingly attempt to symbolically and psychologically dissemble and gain distance from their families and ethnic groups, but they also did not opt for an adversarial style that centered on rejecting institutions of the dominant culture. They did reject many of the norms and apparent values of South African culture, but perhaps in acknowledgment of the perils of overt resistance, they did so in ways that attempted to avoid conflict. The bicultural identity pathway style seemed to be more prevalent among Indian immigrant students. These students emerged as “cultural brokers” mediating the often-conflicting cultural currents of their sending country culture and South African “Indian” culture. Within this identity pathway, the culturally constructed social structures and patterns of social control of immigrant parents and elders maintained a degree of legitimacy. These immigrant students were able to network with equal ease among members of their own ethnic group as well as with other Indian students from different backgrounds. They did not willingly associate with Black African students but tended to find a space of solidarity among Indian South African students. Again, here the issue of psychosocial passing comes into play as Black Indian immigrant students easily passed as South African Indian students. Although not writing specifically about Indian immigrants in South Africa, Portes’ description applies well: “Success did not depend so much on abandoning their culture and language to embrace another society as on preserving their original cultural endowment, while adapting instrumentally to a second” (Portes, Guarnizo, & Landolt, 1999, p. 129). Many Black African immigrant students followed a transcultural style. Given that they were exposed daily to the vibrant, diverse, and multifold South African indigenous cultures (i.e., Sepedi, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, Zulu, Tsonga, Setswana, Setswati, Ndebele), they attempted to creatively fuse aspects of two or more cultures—that of their parental tradition and the new South African cultures. They did not choose between cultures but rather tried to incorporate traits of different cultures while fusing additive elements (Falicov, 2002). However, even in these attempts, they remained true to their ethnic group of origin. For example, elsewhere in the world there are examples of immigrant children not wanting to use the languages of their homeland (e.g., Fillmore, 2000), but that was not something we recorded. If home language was not used, it was not because of a sense of shame or stigma, but perhaps limitations in who else knew it. The fusing

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of different cultural elements was on a superficial level for personal gain in terms of capacity building to forge ahead in a strange country.

Rural/Urban Binary Apartheid ruralized and devalued black lives while urbanizing and valuing whiteness (Neocosmos, 2006). (To clarify, ruralized here refers both to the eviction of Africans, Indians, and Coloreds from urban centers to racially homogeneous townships away from center cities and to the creation of bantustans, semi-autonomous tribal regions not completely unlike America’s system of American Indian reservations.) This rural/urban binary has had semiotic as well as demographic consequence, as African has been seen as rural and backward and South African as urban and modern. Aline’s (Rwandan) piano experience and Alice’s (Zimbabwean) swimming experience both illuminate this assumption and remind us that ascribed identities may not match the lived experience nor self-identify of the labeled newcomer. (See Chapter 3, “Identity as Categorization.”)

New Insights Continental Identity Empirical evidence drawn from the literature indicates that “most people in the world now develop a bicultural identity” that incorporates elements of the local culture with an awareness of a relation to the global culture (Arnett, 2002, p. 777). However, the global/local binary is too simplistic for most of the immigrant students we studied. For many youth, identity is less bicultural than a “complex hybrid” or transcultural (Arnett, 2002, p. 778; SuárezOrozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001). Thus, the cultural challenges of globalization affect immigrants and native-born youth in different ways. For immigrant children, identity work requires braiding together elements of the parent culture, the new culture they are navigating, and an emerging globalized youth culture into a flexible sense of self. For those in the host society, the challenge is to broaden the cultural horizon to incorporate the changing perspectives, habits, and potentials of its diverse newcomers. If those from the host society do not do this, however, the consequences are different for host and newcomer. This research study has revealed that immigrant students’ identities became subjected to a process of evolution and modification within the new social context. In order to counteract the social representation of being a foreigner and to seek a sense of inclusion, many Black (African) immigrant students asserted a “continental identity” to create a sense of solidarity

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with local Black students that concurrently was not as pejoratively labeled as South African. Shared African-ness was better than, as well as more viable to assert, than shared South African-ness. The emphasis on an African identity was also more popular than a global identity (Iyer, 2000). This was intriguing. A global identity, profoundly shaped by American styles in music and dressing, was easily available from popular media. But the emphasis remained on Africanization—what it means to be truly African in spirit, dress code, conduct, morals, music, food, culture, and values. Identities were negotiated within social worlds that indulged in what Thorne (1993) aptly terms “borderwork” and that spanned more than one place. Immigrant students in this study seemed to weave their collective identities out of multiple affiliations and positioning and link their “crosscutting belongingness” with complex attachments and multiple allegiances to issues, peoples, places, and traditions beyond the boundaries of their resident nation-states (Caglar, 2001). It has to be noted that none of the Indian immigrant students in this study identified in terms of a continental African identity nor a continental Asian identity, although a subcontinental identity was relevant. All of them identified in terms of a dominating ethnic identity which, in the case of immigrant students coming from India, was linked to their ancestral country of origin and identified as Indian. Immigrant students who came from Pakistan readily identified as Indian as well. The reason for this could be twofold. First was the fear of being labeled as “Paki,” and second, historically in South Africa, everyone who looked phenotypically “Indian” was seen as a single homogenous group and categorized as Indian. No distinction was made between Indians who hailed from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India, or from any other country of origin.

Self-Agency and an Inherent Drive to Improve the Human Condition of Others As reported in the literature, the majority of immigrant children, coming from a variety of countries and social classes, arrive with extremely positive attitudes towards schooling and education. Findings of this research study concur with the literature in this regard. Almost all immigrant students articulated a strong desire and determination to succeed academically. These children knew how to study and knew that their parents expected them to succeed (Bankston & Zhou, 2002). Consequently, they were serious about their studies. (In saying this, however, we need to repeat an observation that Zúñiga and Hamann, 2009, made related to immigrant and returnedmigrant students they encountered in Mexican schools—because our interviews, like theirs, were all carried out at schools, we do not have any evidence

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from school-age immigrants who were not enrolled; if such young adults exist in significant number in South Africa, this study excludes their perspectives.) As a different and striking feature, however, the findings of this research study differ from the voluminous literature on immigrant students in that there seemed to be an inherent drive on the part of the students we interviewed to improve the human condition of others. There was an asserted sense of brotherhood with indigenous Black students. Black immigrant students wanted to improve the moral, social, cultural, and educational standing of their South African brothers and sisters in the spirit of a common African identity. They apportioned blame to continuing legacy of apartheid for the poor or xenophobic behavior of Black indigenous students and were determined to restore the dignity of the “African nation.” In this sense they may have been concurrently South African in the best sense of that word, as embracers of the inclusive, African humaneness of the 1996 Constitution and its shorthand summary of “The Rainbow Nation.”

Language as a Tool of Power The advent of democracy in South Africa witnessed Black (African) indigenous students very willing to forsake their indigenous languages. The one-way migration of Black (African) indigenous students into English-medium South African public schools bears testimony to this fact. English represented the language of power. Many indigenous Black students attempted to adopt the English language and some even tried to adopt the accent in an attempt to assimilate into the culture and ethos of English medium schools. Not surprisingly, this created tension because when these children returned to their homes in the township, there was a conflict in values between the home and school culture and language. The term “acting larney” (to act like you are a White person, similar to other pejorative slang like “Oreo,” “Banana,” or “Coconut”) became a common accusation in many townships. The early years of democracy were marked by breaking the shackles of apartheid, but this also meant a break away from the African culture, language, and tradition that had been such crucial sources of resilience during the apartheid era. The influx of Black immigrant students into the South African social context came as the transition to democracy and related changed understandings of schooling possibilities were both still in flux. Findings from this study reveal that, perhaps because of the delicacy of the moment, too often the new immigration was understood as a threat. In turn, as one response to that threat, Black (African) students realized that the indigenous languages of South Africa could be used as a means of exclusion and a way of conveying to the “New Other” that they did not belong. Consequently, there has been

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resurgence in the use of African indigenous languages and an expression of cultural identity suddenly has had a less benign second purpose. This has located immigrant students at a more complicated interface of race and racism with other modes and structures, cultures, and representations of social inequalities and exclusions. Crucially and sadly, while making for a sometime toxic environment for immigrant students to negotiate, this stance has hardly helped indigenous South African Black students. Indeed, like working-class Appalachian Whites half a world away in the U.S. whose unheeded complaints about social dislocation have become shriller and less appropriate as they remain unheeded until, in their invective, they have worked against the righteousness of their own cause (Plaut, 1983), the indigenous Black South African students, who have wondered “when will it be our turn?” have often undercut the moral legitimacy of that question by becoming shriller and shriller in their xenophobia and easier to continue to demonize and dismiss.

Relating Findings to the Conceptual Markers of the Study “Transnationalization of identities” refers to ways in which the transnational flow of images, practices, discourses, and perspectives can have profound effect on people’s identities in comparison with both local and global settings. This study has aptly illustrated that immigrant student identities are forged within multilocale lifeworlds that span what have variously been called “transnational social fields” (Glick Schiller et al., 1992), “transnational social spaces” (Pries, 1999), “transnational villages” (Levitt, 2001), and “translocalities” (Appadurai, 1995). What this study has uncovered is that the conventional “scripts of belonging” in the public sphere are based on ethnic/national exclusivism, whereas the transnational experiences lead to more cosmopolitan senses of participation and belonging.

Dialogue Between Findings and Theoretical Groundings of this Study Figures of Identification Findings from this research study revealed that the four figures of identification as propounded by Hall (1996) were clearly evident in the manner in which immigrant students constituted, negotiated, and represented their identities. The majority of immigrant students in this study assumed the figure of difference, through which they constructed an adversarial space living in anxiety of contamination by its other. They did not want to be Black South African, as such. Consequently, they began to construct a theory of “Otherness” based on notions of effectivity, belonging, and “the changing same” (Gilroy, 1998).

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This research study also found that in constructing their identities, immigrant students were involved in a series of political games around fractured or decentered identities in exploring the kaleidoscopic conditions of Blackness. Resultantly, some immigrant students assumed the figure of fragmentation in emphasizing the multiplicity of identities and of positions within their apparent identity. Not wanting to be understood as Black South African, but concurrently not wanting to stick out linguistically to be seen as not South African would be an example of such situated multiplicity. Overall, many immigrant students favored the figure of hybridity with images of border-crossing, marking an image of “between-ness” out of which identities are produced. Hybridity allowed assemblage of self from multiple reconciled constituent parts (instead of the unreconciled milieu of fragmentation). The Diaspora experience was also clearly evident as immigrant students continued to claim pieces of identity related to a homeland where they did not live. Sometimes this Diaspora was geographic (e.g., Indian), sometimes it was linguistic (e.g., Francophone), but in all instances an imagined (and learned) affiliation with elsewhere was part of how students represented themselves in South Africa.

Critical Race Theory Analyzing and interpreting the findings using a CRT lens has revealed that individual and institutional racism is deeply embedded and institutionalized in the South African education system and is politically, economically, and socially operationalized by broader societal structures including its perpetuation by many who lose or are disadvantaged by both its traditional and contemporary manifestations. A juxtaposition of the findings against each of the basic tenets of CRT follows. The first two tenets of CRT, namely that race is a social (not biological) construct and that socially constructed racial categorizations are a fundamental organizing principle of society played out strongly in this research study. Arising from a history of a racially stratified society, South Africans have created a new label—the makwerekwere. This categorization, even though it was new, readily plugged Black immigrants into the existing race stratification continuum. Immigrant students hated this label because of its legitimation of symbolic and sometimes direct violence. The school organization maintained a space for racism, as evident from the discriminatory language practices of teachers and indigenous students. Immigrant students were assigned socially constructed racial labels, and these labels were consequential for the social organization that immigrants then needed to negotiate.

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The third tenet of CRT acknowledges that racism benefits those who are privileged and serves the interests of the powerful to maintain the status quo with respect to racial stratification. This study suggests this was so in the schools we investigated, but it is useful to clarify that many of those who perpetrated the work of racism did not gain particularly from doing that “work.” Rather, the indigenous Black South Africans who seemed most troubled by the immigrant students’ presence found their own claims to redress undermined by their resistance to the immigrant students. Differentiating themselves from the immigrant students’ relative acceptance of the premise that schools offered upward mobility, indigenous students were skeptical of the same schools and both resisted them and were negatively labeled by them, just like the students Willis (1977) described in Britain 30 years earlier. As indigenous students became more shrill and xenophobic, their arguments for redress were weakened (as they seemed less worthy of recompense), and their prospective solidarity with immigrants was undercut. This left intact the continued subordination of the native Black majority, while allowing the social elite to “prove” their responsiveness to diversity by praising the much less numerous immigrant students. Whether the immigrants we interviewed actually will get ahead someday as adults is not yet clear (as we lack continuing data on how interviewed students have fared), but that many believe they will did seem intact. Fourth, CRT challenges the dominant social ideology of color-blindness and meritocracy. Race neutrality and the myth of equal opportunity ignore the reality of the deeply embed­ded racial stratification in society and the impact it has on the quality of life. Black immigrants in this study were racialized as Black (African) South Africans and were sometimes subjected to similar racial prejudices and discrimination as their indigenous Black counterparts. However, even when they were seen as separate from native Blacks, when immigrants were praised for being hardworking instead of feckless like their native peers supposedly were, racial and racist constructions were manifest. Immigrants were told, in a sense, “don’t be like them,” which was clearly intertwined with valuations of race. The fifth CRT tenet asserts that racial identity and racial identification are influenced by the racial stratification that permeates society. This tenet was clearly evident in the xenophobic attacks and the labeling of Black foreigners as makwerekwere, a label salient at school as a microcosm of society. But the tenet was also visible in the dismissive self-fulfilling prophecy that indigenous Blacks would fare less well at school and in the more optimistic, if less commonly achieved, bids to assert a continental identity, a pan-African-ness that could link vulnerable newcomer with subordinated indigenous peer.

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The sixth tenet of CRT acknowledges that assimilation and racial integration are not always in the best interests of the subordinated group. This tenet found expression in some Black immigrant students vehemently rejecting the label “Black,” as evident from responses of Vena and Andrew (see Chapter 3, “Identity as Social Orientation”). But it also raises the larger issue of to which tier, in a stratified society, immigrant students are permitted to assimilate to (Spener, 1988). African and Indian immigrants could “choose” to affiliate as Black and negotiate the hazards still associated with such an identity or they could bid to be accepted in other less disadvantaged categories (Becker, 1990), but that does not mean such bids would be successful, as material conditions and phenotype could readily work against such attempts. The seventh CRT tenet considers the significance of within-group heterogeneity and the existence of simultaneous, multiple, and intersecting identities. This tenet found expression in the call by Black immigrant students to be recognized in terms of multiple and intersecting identities. Hall’s (1996) “fragmentation” and “hybridity” seem to fit here too. The list of countries represented in our sample (see Figure 1.1) highlight a second obvious form of heterogeneity, but our pseudonyms for the three high schools more subtly raise a third source of heterogeneity. The academic trajectories of the learners of various identities varied by the resources and status of the school they were attending. Despite heroic efforts of some dedicated educators, asserting an identity as a serious student and advancing at Paucity High School was a more complicated (and more unlikely) endeavor than the same attempt at Opulent High. The learners we interviewed were parts of groups, both ascribed memberships and self-asserted ones, but what memberships in those groups meant varied, even if there were some patterns. The eighth CRT tenet argues for the centrality, legitimacy, and appropriateness of the lived experience of racial or ethnic minorities in any analysis of racial stratification. In capturing the voices of many immigrant students and, to a lesser extent, their indigenous peers and teachers, we have attempted to honor this tenet directly. Many Black immigrant students found an avenue through this research study to “tell their stories.” This was clearly cathartic for some and traumatic for some (like the student from Zimbabwe who burst into tears during our interview, but who rejected our offer to stop because she wanted her story to be heard and reported). Several participants in this study urged that what we wrote should be presented to higher authorities who could do something about their plight in schools. In this sense, these voices of school practice seek to be considered by those who craft policy. At a higher level of abstraction, we are honoring

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this tenet by taking this manuscript to an American publisher. This work will be in circulation in South Africa where of course it matters, but it will also augment and broaden the larger literature on immigrant students, race, and schooling, topics that, as our bibliography shows, are dominated by examples from North America and Europe. The ninth tenet of CRT insists on placing race and racism in a cultural and historical context, as well as a contemporary sociopolitical context. The categories of Indian and African and Black were not recently invented out of whole cloth, and all of them are freighted. Makwerekwere may be a newer term, but the arriving vulnerable being resisted by the long-term disadvantaged is hardly a new storyline. Fortunately, the tenth tenet of CRT is to inform social justice efforts and the elimination of racial oppression. We share this goal and think that giving voice to the often silenced and overlooked is one piece of that effort. In turn, asking who wins and who loses in the current status quo enables a more sophisticated analysis that, we hope, positions South Africans to ask whether current schooling is characterized by the dynamics necessary to realize the promise of the new constitution and positions other readers to think how South African examples illuminate decisions and actions that need to be pursued in other countries and on behalf of, or, better, with other students.

Conclusion The constitution, negotiation, and representation of the self in different worlds of experience and in different interactional contexts cannot be understood without reference to wider social processes and cultural expectations that frame and surround the migration of immigrants. This research study uncovered both similarities and differences with what was found in the literature review. South Africa is like other countries, and South Africa is not like anywhere else. Nowhere else is the majority population’s reaction to newcomers so profoundly shaped by a sense of not yet getting what was long denied them. Similarly, nowhere else does the majority population have such reason to be skeptical of school, the vehicle that purportedly is to be a vehicle for social inclusion and upward mobility. However, as elsewhere, immigrant students in the South African context also have to contend with discrimination and harassment. This is often in terms of intra-Black dynamics. Immigrants are invisible in the curriculum, excluded by peers’ and sometimes teachers’ language choices, and pejoratively labeled. Each of these has consequences for their identity construction, psychosocial wellbeing, and decisions related to academic orientation, racial and linguistic passing, and the like. Black immigrant students have differ-

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ent stories to tell regarding the way race affects their life experi­ences. These stories have not had as significant an influence on policies, practices, and opinions as have the dominant cultural narratives about race. Black immigrant students have unique perspectives on racial matters, and their voices speak of experi­ences involving marginalization, devaluation, and stigmatization. They also illuminate the key dichotomy—immigrant versus indigenous Black—that is pernicious, but not inevitable and that must be transcended (perhaps in pan-African or the pan-African-Indian-and-colored solidarity of the co-opted assertion of Blackness that once prevailed in the resistance to apartheid) if South Africa to become more just and successful. It becomes clear from these narratives that “South African-ness” is much more than just obtaining official documentation as proof of citizenship. It involves contests over territoriality of space and place in the daily requirements of life. It is imperative to not only acknowledge and recognize the hetero­geneous constitution of new and traditional Black groups in South Africa, but to incorporate the linguistic and cultural capital of these differing groups into the very fabric of schooling so as to ensure that all students feel a sense of belonging and feeling at home. The cultural lives, cultural expressions, and cultural experiences of Black immigrant students need to be validated in schools as part of the process of their inclusion and integration in schools and broader society. It is only in this way that all students can truly become “cosmopolitan citizens” of the world guided by common human values. In pointing towards cosmopolitanism, we do not mean at the expense of more local identities. Indeed, as previous invocations of ubuntu point towards, cosmopolitanism can successfully embed African-ness.

5 Implications for Education Policy, for Research and Practice

We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things that significant others want to see in us. —Taylor, 1992, p. 33

Immigrant Learners The main purpose of this study was to explore how immigrant students constitute, negotiate, and represent their identities in South African schools and to explore if new forms of immigrant students’ self-identities are beginning to emerge. This work was pursued in reference to Hall’s (1996) four figures of identification and to critical race theory, with the latter perhaps more salient to this final section which, embedding the issue of social justice, asks: “What next?” Our purpose comes with a caveat. This study was confined to immigrant students in one province only, namely Gauteng, in South Africa. There the shifting demographics of learners have taken the form of one-way migration of learners from former Black township schools into former model C and Construction, Negotiation, and Representation of Immigrant Student Identities, pages 105–118 Copyright © 2015 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. 105

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former Indian schools. This pattern, which is not unique to Guateng, has allowed former model C schools and former Indian schools to increase their school fees and thereby control access. Consequently, and understandably so, there seems to be a concentration of Black immigrant students in former African township and inner city schools. Because of the large number of immigrant students in the latter schools, power struggles and the formation of identities play out in a highly contested terrain. In terms of our study, that means Paucity High School was much more directly impacted by the arrival of newcomers than were Median or Opulence High Schools. Even in a small sample of just three schools, this provides for substantial variation between sites, and when points are in common that makes them more valid (Patton, 1990). The former model C and former Indian school have a very limited number of Black immigrant students. But, even here, contexts, opportunities, networks, and social mirroring acted as powerful gravitational fields in shaping the identities of Black immigrant students.

Summary of Key Findings Utilizing De Fina’s (2003) framework, the data from this study were analyzed on two levels. The first level focused on the analysis of two basic aspects of the construction and expression of identity: namely, the projection of the self into specific social roles and the expression of membership into groups and communities. The first aspect, the projection of self into social roles, was analyzed by considering ways of presenting the self in relation to others and of ways of presenting the self in relation to social experiences. We looked at the role of the self as narrative, the self with respect to others as expressed in social orientation, and the role of the self with respect to social experiences as agency. The second level of analysis of identity dealt more with the explicit construction of self in relation to the immigrant student’s community or to external groups. Basic to membership construction are self and other categorizations that are studied through identification strategies such as identity as social representation and identity as categorization.

Identity as Narrative Immigrant identity manifested itself within the context of identity as narrative in this research study in four predominant ways: namely, personality/character traits and interests, dominating identities, ethnic identities, and hyphenated identities. A central thread running through “identity as narrative” in almost all responses of immigrant students was the purport-

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ed moral degeneracy of indigenous Black students. Immigrant students, whose language capabilities, phenotype, and aspirations all factored into how they constructed their identities and responded to external ascriptions of the same, had to decide how and how much to affiliate with extant local definitions of Blackness.

Identity as Social Orientation Immigrant students chose varied ways to present and orientate themselves in relation to others in the host country. South African societal norms and practices forced them to orient their thinking into unfamiliar and fraught taxonomies, like the categorization of “Black.” It is important to note that, although the phenotypic features of many immigrant students allowed them to “pass” for one of the local Blacks, all immigrant students were resolute in maintaining their sense of moral uprightness and they were reluctant often to be seen as “Black” if that meant having the negativities of such a label projected onto them. The immigrant students claimed that because of the political status of the host country (i.e., the anti-foreigner violence that flared as our study began), it was in their interest to pass as local Blacks, but they wanted to do this mainly in terms of appearance, not more profoundly. For many immigrant students, the behavior and code of conduct of their local Black peers in the host country represented a site of contamination and shame (a storyline with uncomfortable parallels to supposedly vanquished apartheid rationales).

Identity as Agency A significant finding with regard to identity as agency was immigrant students’ strong innate desire and sense of self-empowerment and self-determination to succeed. School seemed like a viable place for creation of an academic identity. They seemed to be motivated by a strong survival instinct and self-will to advance in a country that was often hostile to foreigners. The degree of initiative and self agency of immigrant students seemed to be mainly threefold in nature: namely, the manner in which they responded to the challenge of language, their strong work ethic, and their drive to improve the human condition of others.

Identity as Social Representation Immigrant students’ construction of identity as related to social representations indicated their dependence on the social context and reinforced the notion that identities are not merely mental concepts, but that

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the processes of constructions and negotiation of identities draw from and contribute to mental representations. “Who do I want to be?” is inextricably intertwined with considerations of “Who can I be?”. What identities are available and what does it mean to affiliate with any of them?

Identity as Categorization Yet identity work is not just autobiographic—“What do I want?” Such personal agency is influenced and constrained by social constructions of meaning and acts of ascription that individuals have to react to. Immigrant students were parts of larger configurations, not least of those the category immigrant, but also racial identities including dimensions of Blackness. At school and in the larger society, immigrants were cast into particular categories with associated characteristics or features. This categorization process appeared to negatively influence many immigrant students’ formation of social identities and their sense of belonging to groups.

Significance of Findings—Generation of New Knowledge The new knowledge that emerged and pushed boundaries back in this field of study was fivefold in nature. First, in order to counteract the social representation of being a foreigner, and to seek a sense of inclusion, many Black (African) immigrant students asserted a “continental identity” to create a sense of solidarity with local black students. This was clearly a continental identity as opposed to a global identity (Iyer, 2000), and it offered indigenous South Africans an escape hatch from the negative associations of their South African identity. That does not mean indigenous students accepted this invitation or even understood that it was available, but it does point to complex identity work of trying to assert solidarity while avoiding negative implications of the proposed joint affiliation. Second, and consistent with the first point, there seemed to be a heartfelt drive on the part of immigrant students to improve the human condition of others. While their assertions of collective sense of brotherhood with indigenous Black students were furtive and inconsistent (coexisting with other efforts to avoid being pejoratively labeled), they seemed sincere and optimistic. Black immigrant students wanted to improve the moral, social, cultural, and educational standing of their South African brothers and sisters in the spirit of a common “African” identity. A third dynamic, however, complicated these furtive bids for solidarity and joint advancement. In response to the influx of Black immigrant students, Black (African) students suddenly realized that the indigenous languages of South Africa could be used as a means of exclusion and a way of conveying to the “New Other” that they did not belong. Consequently,

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there has been resurgence in the use of African indigenous languages, but little concurrent social gain or broader respect for indigenous identity, as the articulations of resistance have been shrill, brash, and anti-scholastic. Immigrants’ largely unrequited bids for solidarity and locals’ maneuvering to differentiate themselves from the newcomers led to a fourth and fifth dynamic: immigrant students resisting self-identifying according to skin pigmentocracy and resisting the aspersions of the label makwerekwere. Our interviewees spoke first of their identities in terms of personal attributes, such as personality and physical features, and social attributes, such as culture, language, tradition, customs, ethnicity, and land of origin. They did not want to be understood within the historically freighted racial categories of South Africa, but they also did not want to be part of the new subordination of foreigners. This meant literally trying to avoid the physical violence that erupted against the makwerekwere, but also the semiotic violence of such pejorative labeling.

Research Assumptions Revisited This section responds to the research assumptions shared in Chapter 1. Research Assumption 1: Immigrant students’ ethnic identity is a key factor in the way they adaptively respond to challenges in their new country (Phinney, 2007). This study also found an overwhelming emphasis on ethnic identity by immigrant students. Almost all respondents identified themselves according to their ethnic origins, irrespective of how long they had been in South Africa. Diasporic identity was a component of the identity toolkit that immigrants used to negotiate South African high schools and communities. Research Assumption 2: The majority of immigrant children, coming from a variety of countries and social classes, arrive with extremely positive attitudes towards schooling and education (Bankston & Zhou, 2002). The self-determination and self-agency of immigrant students was obvious. Perhaps peer slights felt less consequential with the self-counsel that “through schooling I am making something of myself.” Whether this is quite the right explanation or not, it must be acknowledged that despite the social conditions and the hostile social environment in which many of these immigrant students found themselves, they displayed extremely positive attitudes towards their schooling and education. In this favorable attitude, however, we found little evidence of any substantive critique of

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schooling and its role in perpetuating the social stratification of South Africa. Immigrants students at moments invited their indigenous peers to join in an identity (a continental one) that would encompass a favorable orientation toward schooling, but we heard little questioning by immigrant students of how low expectations of indigenous Black students became alienating self-fulfilling prophecies. Immigrant students thought the school offered opportunity as it was currently constituted. What needed to change were the attitudes of peers, and those attitudes were seen as separate from— not a product of—personal and familial experience with school. Research Assumption 3: The social context is essential in predicting which identity is constructed (Suárez-Orozco, 2000). In a like manner, this study found that the social context played a pivotal role in the construction of immigrant student identities. None of the immigrant students identified themselves as “Black” or “Indian” prior to their entry into and exposure to South African society. However, the South African context within which many of these students found themselves forced them to assume elements of an imposed identity of “Black” and “Indian.” These identities were hazardous and viewed with skepticism, but so too was the ascribed pejorative identity of makwerekwere. As Becker (1990) described a generation earlier in considering Portuguese immigrant students in America, many of these immigrant students in South Africa moved across and within different identity domains, shifted and reevaluated their self-conception, and drew from different elements from the various available identities that they could assert. Context constrained and shaped what they did, but it did not script it. Research Assumption 4: Youth cultivate multiple identities that are required to function in diverse, often incommensurable cultural realities (Suárez-Orozco, 2004; Phinney, 2007). As just noted, immigrant students constructed, negotiated, and represented themselves through multiple identities in an attempt to find a sense of belonging and to function within incommensurable cultural realities. Most assumed hyphenated identities (albeit that the hyphen was heavily skewed in favor of their ethnic identities) to negotiate imposed identities (e.g., Makwerekwere, Paki, Black), continental identities, and transcultural identities. Research Assumption 5: The ability to join the mainstream unnoticed is more challenging when one is racially marked (Wu, 2002).

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This study found that some immigrant students claimed that they could easily join the mainstream unnoticed because of their phenotypical likeness, but that was not a choice that all who could make it opted to make. Others, however, could not so easily pass. Although of African or South Asian heritage, some who sought to were not able to join available South African niches. They were marked as different, and that marking had consequence. Although often painful, the refusal by some indigenous students to welcome some of the newcomers may have aided those newcomers’ orientation to a more academic identity, something like “If I can’t be like you and welcomed by you, I won’t be skeptical of school like you are; instead I will focus on it and do well at it.” This raises one more key point: The mainstream and the academically successful were not necessarily synonymous categories in South Africa. In that sense, not being in the mainstream could reduce pressure to be skeptical of school or to pose as apathetic about it. Research Assumption 6: Contexts, opportunities, networks, and social mirroring act as powerful gravitational fields shaping the adaptation of immigrant children. Societal attitudes and perceptions towards people of color in some societies can present a negative social mirror (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 1995). In this study, the social mirror encountered by Black immigrants was often negative and fueled immigrant stress (and explained teary interviews as well as the yearnings to “go home”). But indigenous Black students were also sometimes subject to negative reflections (not necessarily the same ones as the newcomers). The immigrant students’ display of resiliency in the face of this negativity may have been supported by their avoidance or self-differentiation away from this second negative mirror. But the viability of those bids to be seen as different had its own limitations (not being seen as locally Black raised the prospect of the hazardous makwerekwere label as another alternative). So the newcomers sometimes tried to seem like local Blacks, sometimes tried to not be seen like local Blacks, and sometimes proposed a continental identify that would encompass both themselves and their locally born peers but within a frame that was aspirational rather than freighted with claims of degeneracy and immorality. This third strategy was a bid to bypass both negative social mirrors.

Suggestions for Further Research Any qualitative study uncovers more to investigate, and whether one scans the horizon or delves for depth in the field, opportunities for further research abound. Worldwide, the immigrant student landscape is rich with pos-

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sibilities for research in educational issues, and this text is just one reminder that rich contributions to that literature might be drawn from the context of South Africa. There are additional new frontiers to explore related to policy implementation issues and the role and responsibilities of local actors within this context. Can formal educational policy in South Africa counter that the social strains that have generated the often self-fulfilling prophecies of antischolasticism and fecklessness among many locals and, in turn, their negative lashing out against the newcomers? Might the furtively asserted prospect of a continental idea return newcomers and locals alike to an orientation of brotherhood and aspiration, instead of immigrants’ engagement with schools being read as a critique of the locally born majority? What is needed is focused inquiry about what race and racism mean to Black people within and across Black groups, and contextualized by attention to nationality, immigration status, language, ethnicity, and religion, among other markers of cultural identity. Here we have considered: ◾◾ How do young people in and out of school in adopted lands understand themselves and the changes around them? ◾◾ How do immigrant students understand the people around them in the receiving (or rejecting) country? ◾◾ How do immigrant students change and adapt in the intercultural experience? A bigger pool of students, schools, and school locations could amplify and enrich our first answers to these questions. But beyond trying to craft broader and more robust datasets that illuminate the first three questions, there are important additional questions that this study points to: ◾◾ Just as Zúñiga and Hamann (2009) have considered what student return looks like from a traditional receiving country (the United States) to a traditional sending one (Mexico), we can similarly ask in African context: What do migration and return to motherland mean for immigrant students’ educational achievements? What happens, educationally and otherwise, if the students we interviewed go back to their homelands? ◾◾ Our study insists that the African experience be included in the larger literature about schooling and the international migration of children, but how does it change this larger literature? What other cases/places need to be added to round out this literature? ◾◾ How is the world changing as a result of the unprecedented movement of children across national borders? This is an interpretive question, and it has a normative analogue: How should the world

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change as the result of the unprecedented movement of children across national borders? At best, the voices of teachers shared here just begin to trace a response to this second question. How do South African teachers reconstruct their professional identities as a result of the unprecedented movement of children across national borders? What does all of this mean as we prepare teachers for new and changing realities in the classroom where familiar (if unresolved) challenges of race and ethnic diversities in the local population are now made even more complex by new immigrant identities in the same pedagogical spaces? Should South African teacher education programs actively recruit/encourage immigrant students to become teachers? Would the prevalence of such teachers allow the challenging of the immigrant vs. local dichotomy and perhaps the construction of the more unifying continental vision? How do immigrant teachers reconstruct their professional identities? In ethnically diverse and increasingly transnational societies, how does schooling relate to hierarchies of inequality? Is South Africa typical or atypical in the favorable juxtaposition of immigrant students’ academic orientation with that of the long underserved majority? What critical lessons and “best practice” could be learned and used to accelerate the racial desegregation and social integration of immigrant students in South African schools? Does the educational system reproduce inequalities by replicating the existing social order? Or does schooling help to overcome social inequalities by emerging as an avenue for status mobility? Noting that this study focused at the secondary level, how do immigrant students at tertiary institutions (i.e., universities) constitute, negotiate, and represent their identities at tertiary institutions? With tertiary education not obligatory (unlike secondary education) and thus with those not wanting to attend school largely out of the equation, are immigrant and nativeborn relations in tertiary settings qualitatively different than what we recorded? Are the findings from three consciously disparate schools in Guateng province equally apt for the remainder of South Africa?

Further studies may build upon the findings of the current study and may deepen the quality constructs of transferability and generalizability. We recommend these areas of research to better understand experiences of immigrant students within the South African schooling context.

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Recommendations for Policy and Practice If the previous section hints at the eagerness of scholars (i.e., us) to always identify more things to learn, we do not mean to imply that with a topic like that of this study that the best next step is just to pursue more questions. Indeed, the following recommendations for policy, practice, and scholarly interest are made as a result of this study. These recommendations emerged within the context of this bounded case study. However, we propose that they have relevance (likely with adaptation) beyond the three schools and one province where we studied.

Recommendation 1 As the number of Black immigrants continue to increase in South Africa, it is important to recognize the impact of their presence in South African schools, especially the specific, unique needs of students who come from these populations. Because of the important role of ethnic identity in the lives of immigrants and in their contacts with those outside their own group, it is essential for institutions and community leaders to recognize the needs of immigrant children to have their ethnicity acknowledged and valued. Immigrant students thrive when they can practice and express their culture in their lives. Schools can help by giving recognition to diverse cultures and encouraging young people to explore and learn about their own and others’ ethnicity. The development and maintenance of secure ethnic identities in immigrants benefits both immigrant communities and society at large.

Recommendation 2 Institutional racism calls our attention to the hidden ways in which racism is extended into every facet of life by virtue of the fact that it informs the institutional rules and regulations, the ordering conceptions of work and play, economic and political arrangements, and cultural conceptions. Schools and other educational institutions are a significant locus where different cultural forms interact. Government has a key role to play in “leveling the playing fields” in terms of opportunities afforded to different groups. Negotiating issues of language, identity, and power is critical in the South African context, and this includes countering the “we were here first” nihilism that fuels locals’ resistance to newcomers. Responding better to immigrants cannot mean responding less effectively to the South Africa-born. Schooling should not be a “zero sum” game. This recommendation links directly with economic globalization

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and is deeply implicated in the maintenance of support of and resistance to emerging hegemonic projects. In this regard, normative support from school authorities is critical for the attainment of other optimal conditions and would help to accelerate the process.

Recommendation 3 Schools should promote democracy through maximizing opportunities for dialogue. Schools require agreements on common values, and these are reached through discussion. This requires that minority voices be given opportunities for expression and that conscious efforts be made to dismantle the barriers of racism, which inhibit participation. In paraphrase of Dewey (1916/2002, p. 97), in order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group must have an equitable opportunity to receive and to take from others. Education for democratic citizenship is inconceivable without debate and discussion that is inclusive of many voices and perspectives. Indeed, debate and discussion require diversity. As Parker (2004, p. 453) notes: “Diversity figures as the most central deliberative asset.” Acknowledged and respected diversity, in other words, is the essence of democracy.

Recommendation 4 Providing a strong foundation in language competencies is one of the things that can be done to compensate for limited exposure of children and immigrants to the host-country languages at home and to assist children of low-educated parents with limited knowledge of the host-country language with schoolwork. The recognition of indigenous languages in South Africa’s 1996 Constitution was an important, restitutional, progressive step. It cannot be allowed to be coopted into a spirit diametrically opposed to the original intent.

Recommendation 5 It becomes imperative not only to acknowledge and recognize the heterogeneous constitution of Black groups in South Africa but to incorporate the linguistic and cultural capital of these differing groups into the very fabric of schooling so as to ensure that all students feel a sense of belonging and feeling at home. It is only in this way that all students can truly become “cosmopolitan citizens” of the world guided by common human values. In this sense, students get to be of somewhere and of some group, as well as of larger places and constellations.

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Recommendation 6 There is a need for a broader frame to consider local manifestations of national expressions of race and racism in terms of the social control of migration flows. The South African majority has concerns over global power as a result of the agglomeration of technologies and finance and of the positioning of old and new centers of capital in the world system, but these concerns cannot be addressed through fractious pitting of vulnerable newcomers against the vulnerable locally born. We need not only to shift but also to lift boundaries of taken-for-granted identifications. The 21st century will very much be about negotiating between different and overlapping interests and affiliations, about creating space for individuality in the fashioning of inter- and transcultural identifications. The optimism of the advent of democracy in the 1990s was inevitably going to disperse, but now South Africa needs to reassert an inclusive vision that celebrates heterogeneity and uses schooling not to include new populations in old, still-stratified hierarchies, but rather includes them in newly inclusive social transformations.

Final Thoughts As a significant global player—host of the 2010 World Cup and the “S” in the acronym BRICS (which also references Brazil, Russia, India, and China)—South Africa is no longer an isolated country largely bypassed by transnational changes. Instead, “transnationalism” and “transnational social spaces” (Glick Schiller & Fouron, 1999, p. 344) inform and influence the ever-shifting identities of South African youth, including immigrants. Social networks and cross-border linkages precipitate, reinforce, entrench, and ultimately constrain transnational migration and eventually integration. In direct contrast to the assimilation hypothesis that sees migrants as casting off the old and absorbing the new, this study has revealed that identity must be seen as one of hybridity, where immigrants take on a multiplicity of identities that are a combination of home and host (Basch et al., 1994; Becker, 1990; Bhabha, 1990; Bondi, 1993; Hall, 1996; Mitchell, 1997; Smith & Guarnizo, 1998). Immigrants’ viable advancement to adulthood “does not depend so much on abandoning their culture and language to embrace another society as on preserving their original cultural endowment, while adapting instrumentally to a second” (Portes et al., 1999, p. 129). The construction, negotiation, and representation of immigrant identities in different worlds of experience and in different interactional contexts cannot be understood without reference to wider social processes and cul-

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tural expectations. A concrete example of ways in which social processes impact on identity is the generalization of specific classification practices as tools for the interpretation of reality: in this case, the centrality of the construct of ethnicity. Individual and group identities have been pressured and transformed by processes of migration. Diaspora formation and cultural hybridization have emerged. Rather than being fixed and essentialized, these new forms of cultural identity are contingent and liquid in nature (Hall, 1992, 1996; Hoogevelt, 1997). The Diaspora experience was strongly evident in the characterizations of our interviewees. Immigrant students recognized the necessary heterogeneity and diversity of their quotidian negotiation of school and life by means of conceiving of “identity” as something that lives with and through, not despite, difference (Bhabha, 1994). Immigrant students constantly produced and reproduced themselves anew, through transformation and difference, as evident from their shifting and new identities— namely, variously assimilative, continental, and hyphenated identities. For these students, the formation of their identities was to a large extent shaped by the historical, political, and social contexts in which they were located. The complex and constant interplay between the exclusionary conditions of a social structure that was marked by race (Black, makwerekwere, etc.) and the psychological and cultural strategies employed by immigrant students (continental identity, hyphenated identity) to accommodate themselves to everyday indignities as well as to resist them, witnessed what Du Bois (1903/1989) termed a sense of “double consciousness.” They perceived the world and considered how the world perceived them and then drew from both to construct identities, including using the extant racial designations of South Africa. However, these identifications were merely a way of adapting to the host country. Black immigrant students did not internalize these categorizations. It was not part of their self-identification. Rather, it was a form of “imposed identity.” They remained true to their ethnic origin and preferred to be identified by their ethnic identity that was hyphenated by the term “South African.” In an increasingly transnational and globalized world, conventional “scripts of belonging” (Cagler, 2001) in the public sphere that are based on ethnic/national exclusivism should be challenged to accommodate transnational experiences. This could lead to more cosmopolitan senses of participation and belonging. Schools and other social spaces are a significant locus where different cultural forms interact. Negotiating issues of identity, language, and power is critical in the South African context. Schools should promote democracy through maximizing opportunities for dialogue. This requires that minority voices such as Black immigrant students be given op-

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portunities for expression and that conscious efforts are made to dismantle the barrier of racism, which inhibits participation. It has become apparent that students are constructing new transnational and cultural identities and actively working towards a South Africa where “the spirit of Ubuntu—that profound African sense that we are human only through the humanity of other human beings—is not a parochial phenomenon, but [adds] globally to our common search for a better world” (CrywsWilliams, 1997, p. 82). The significance of this research in relation to international development issues and in a broader global context lies in the fact that most countries in the world face challenges of immigrant students and their shifting identifications. This study provides a glimpse of how Black immigrant youth are currently engaging with issues of race, identities, culture, and ethnicity. The cases are particular, but they illuminate identity, affiliation, and academic orientation dynamics that are relevant to education and life choices pretty well anywhere in the world.

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